


Cause We Belong To the Hurricane

by deathmallow



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: AU, F/M, Families of Choice, Gen, The Revolution Will Be Televised, johanna becomes the mockingjay, tags to be updated with chapters, that one where they don't win the war in six weeks, the world at war
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-04
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2018-01-11 02:59:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 48
Words: 348,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1167845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathmallow/pseuds/deathmallow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The rebellion doesn't belong to one person--it belongs to us all.</i>  When disaster strikes in the arena, the rebels are left scrambling to recover, and turn to an unlikely inspiration: Johanna Mason.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for char death, violence, language, references to sex slavery/prostitution, and drug and alcohol abuse. 
> 
> Char tags, etc. will be updated with further chapters--don't want to spoil too much ahead of time! ;)

At sixteen, Haymitch Abernathy had learned harshly enough that fierce hope for surviving the long odds, coupled with a belief in his own wits to snatch the situation out of the fire, could only lead to trouble. But apparently after last year’s dizzying success he’d gone stupid and thought he might actually pull off the impossible yet again. He’d outlasted twice as many tributes as any victor ever had, taken down twice as many Careers up close as any of them ever had, saved twice as many tributes in one year as any of them ever had. Hell, seemingly impossible double feats seemed to be the only ones he _could_ successfully manage, so why shouldn’t he have been able to save the same tributes twice?

Mostly, he could admit to himself in the still, quiet hours of the night of that spring when the ghouls and guilt came to call again and now he had no liquor to chase them off, the kids mattered too much for him to even consider failing, and if he looked back, if he started to doubt and hesitated, he was lost and so were they. He should have figured that fate, in the end, was much like the patrons that used to buy him—wanting to fuck him and in doing so, remind him who made the rules.

It started off well. Finnick and Mags had gotten Katniss and Peeta, Johanna and Blight had gotten Beetee and Wiress. But then Haymitch himself had barely slept in the four days since the Games began—much like last year, he was running purely on black coffee, short catnaps, occasional surges of adrenaline, and sheer willpower. It probably didn’t help he’d stacked months of more physical and mental stress on before the Games ever began, training for all of it with the kids by day and planning and sometimes dealing secretly with Plutarch for half the night. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually slept more than a broken hour or two before waking again. He could feel the effects of the fatigue and the stress, because his body was slower, his mind fogged: _much like being drunk_ , he thought wryly.

So he could feel for his friends down there on the beach, exhausted and still shocked from Mags’ death by sacrificing herself to the monkeys, from the jabberjays that had tortured Blight, Finnick, and Katniss, from the constant near-escapes they’d had from fights and from the arena traps. The morning sun rose at their backs, a fierce red in the pale pink sky, painting the calm green waters below with bloody ripples and streaks. They had barely slept either—seemed like bad luck kept happening to them, and the One and Two pack weren’t risking an outright confrontation yet but they cleverly harried the little alliance from the shadows and kept them off guard. But even if he was exhausted too, he was aware enough to watch with a sense of slowly unfolding horror as Finnick, barely able to keep his eyes open, numbly miscounted by one and the group of them walked right into the still-unknown 8 o’clock zone. His eyes instinctively flicked over to the clock displayed on his console in neon green—7:49 AM. 

At that moment he couldn’t help but remember how powerless a mentor really was. All he could do, as ever, was watch and listen to the events unfold and just hope that at the end of it all he would have them alive for him to actually be able to do something.

The Capitol, as ever, lavished only the best on the Games. They gave the console equipment in Mentor Central an upgrade every few years as some new thing came out of Three and Five’s cooperative development.

So his diminutive earpieces picked up every sound in crystal-clear audio, and the screen showed everything in sharp definition and vibrant color. Blight’s cry of alarm as the mutts approached transmitted loud and clear. The jewel-bright iridescence of the hand-sized mosquitoes from Finnick’s arena was terribly beautiful and vivid in a way it hadn’t been with the equipment of ten years ago. Child as he’d been watching the 44th Games, and watching them on a badly flickering screen in that old Seam house every night, he didn’t remember the scorpion-hawks from Blight’s arena as quite so terribly beautiful. He could almost see every individual yellow-and-red feather, and the venom glistened on those deadly talong.

But the wolves were just like he remembered from last year, fast and deadly. The _crack_ as Katniss dodged a red-furred one to line up her shot and stumbled over a fallen log was sickening. With her scream of pain he realized it hadn’t been a stick that broke as he caught a glimpse of splintered bone poking through the leg of her wetsuit, and the vivid crimson of blood flowed suddenly onto the emerald-green ferns.

All it took was that—he was veteran enough to know that the outcome of so many Games turned on one single stroke of good or bad luck. She might have equally easily slipped sprinting on the slippery rocks to the Cornucopia, or running downhill hellbound to escape the monkeys, but she hadn’t. But now, one misstep and one mutt seizing opportunity to grab her by the throat changed everything. He must have known the exact moment before everyone else in Panem, watched her heart rate skyrocket and then seize and flatline as her body went into shock. By the time Johanna planted an axe in the mutt and shoved it off Katniss, exposing her wide-staring eyes in an unnaturally pale face spattered with blood above her torn-open throat, the cannon had already sounded.

He heard Peeta’s scream and he knew he’d sounded like that once, knowing he was too late and his entire world had just died. He seized on that reality tenaciously, one small kernel of something he could think about and handle, because the fullness of what had just happened was unfathomable. His brain couldn’t wrap itself around the concepts of _Katniss_ and _dead_ and make them tie together. He sat there and once Clover had come over and put her hand on his shoulder a minute or an hour later, he realized that he was shaking all over in an effort to not scream himself.

“Haymitch,” Clover said, glancing at him with worried brown eyes, “they’ve got some wounded—Peeta included. They’ll all pitch in for some supplies.” Of course she was concerned. Not for District Nine’s victors: Rye died in the opening melee and Amaranth in the gigantic wave on the first day. But Blight was in there, probably wounded after the pitched battle with all those old nightmare mutts come back again, and the fact that they’d used her voice in the jabberjays spoke loud and clear that like Finnick’s Annie, they knew exactly how much Clover meant to Blight.

He needed to tend to—needed to pull himself together. Clover was managing. Annie was managing, even after losing Mags. One tribute still left alive—he could still get Peeta out alive. Didn’t know what that meant for the rebellion, Katniss had been the hope they’d all hung their future upon, but…never mind it. All that mattered was keeping the boy alive and hoping against hope that Coin from Thirteen didn’t cancel that hovercraft now and condemn all of them in there to death.

He would have to deal with Plutarch, of course. Try to find some way to talk to him. He’d do that. Medical supplies, though—he looked at the screen and saw that Peeta was limping, favoring his right leg which had a bite mark on the calf. Unaccountably he laughed, because it was too awful and too ridiculous and of _course_ this was how the fucking Hunger Games worked. “The stupid shits couldn’t have bitten the _metal_ leg?” Seeing the look wrinkled, patient old Cotton from Eleven gave him and knowing he probably sounded on the edge of losing it, he forced himself to calm down. “Yeah. Of course. Let me get it together.”

For the next hour or so, he gratefully lost himself in the task of making sure Peeta and his allies had what he needed. He took it step by step—what did they need? Bandages, something sterile to wash out the wounds, needles and thread for sutures for Peeta’s torn leg and Finnick’s slashed arm. Antibiotics would be out of price range already. Everything was priced high, right from the gong. Didn’t matter because infection wouldn’t be too much of a concern anyway—they only had to hang on another fifteen hours now, if that damn hovercraft was still coming. It had to be. 

When he checked with the parachute crews, they informed him that Luma, Carrick, and Cedrus had called in their transfer authorizations already. Doing the quick math, they figured out the shares for medical supplies for two Three tributes, one Four, two Seven tributes, and one Twelve. He tried to not flinch at the last number. It still didn’t seem real. Looking at Peeta’s numb expression as he trudged through the jungle, leaning on Blight’s shoulder, obviously he couldn’t fathom it either.

He hesitated when they asked if he wanted to include a note. What the hell could he say? _Sorry?_ But then he thought of the only thing worth saying right now, and he could only hope it would get through to Peeta. He remembered all too well that stunned feeling of having suddenly lost everything, and letting the will to survive slip away was all too easy at that point. 

The parachute floated down lazily, swaying slightly back and forth in the still air of the pink sky, metallic artificial silver with its smooth clean lines against all the riotous green melee of the jungle. It finally landed about fifteen feet up a thick-trunked tree with the dark-and-light dappled bark that meant they could tap for more water. Johanna immediately shinnied up to retrieve the package, agile and sure in her climbing, and tugged the parachute free from where it had snagged on the tree limb, dropping it down to Blight’s waiting hands. 

They immediately started treating their wounds with the supplies. He watched Johanna hand Peeta the slip of paper that told the boy, and all the rest of them, _Stay alive._ But he knew it wouldn’t be enough to keep everything going, and he saw with relief that Johanna gripped Peeta’s shoulder, leaning in and murmuring something to him, certain that she was cluing him in. It was dangerous, but now necessary. It had been one thing to keep the kids ignorant for their own safety, but that wouldn’t work now. Telling Peeta now exactly why he needed to stick with them would keep him from going berserk and starting the dissolution of the alliance by attacking some of the others, or worse, heading off on his own. He’d already lost Katniss. He couldn’t afford to lose Peeta as well. 

There was nothing more he could do for them right now, and as he watched, the familiar neon-blue light lit up, the one in the lower left of his console. They’d installed that for the 61st Games. Before that, mentors had to rely on an aide to inform them, or else a call from downstairs, and there had been enough complaints that both aides and mentor phones were better used on looking after the living tributes.

Getting up from his seat, he headed over to the Seven station, where Cedrus had let Clover sit next to him and be able to tap into the clearest audio and visual feed focused currently on Blight and Johanna. Lame ducks, unless they jumped to an open spot at an active station where the second mentor was off-duty, were treated to whatever camera and audio feed the Gamemakers currently felt like sending to their mentor station. Last year, they’d all been focused on Katniss and Peeta, of course. Others just barely paid attention to the twenty-four panel monitor wall, without any audio, although at this point most of those monitors had gone dark, including the one on the bottom row, one in from the right edge—the one for the Twelve female tribute. That was the rough feed, hours and hours from dozens of cameras, ready to be culled down into the two and a half hour highlight reel ready for nightly release to the districts in time for the mandatory viewing. At least Caesar and Claudius wouldn’t have to create much filler bullshit this year to pad out the nightly time requirement—each day of the Games thus far had been grimly action-packed. 

“They’ve lit up the blue. I’m heading down,” he informed Clover—they never said _I’m going to the tribute morgue_ but they all knew what it meant. “Can you take over Twelve for a few?” She’d still be able to keep an eye on Blight from there, since it would be the same feed, but at least he’d have someone to answer the telephone if need be.

She nodded, putting aside the headphones and giving him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder as she moved towards the end of the row, the Twelve station. “It’s not gonna be easy for you this time,” she said, the metallic edge of grief in her own voice. She’d already dealt with Amaranth and Rye herself, friends that she’d known and lived alongside for years, and she’d co-mentored with Rye for close to twenty years, except for the one year that Nine had tested Amaranth out alongside Rye and quickly agreed she didn’t have the touch for it at all. He glanced towards Carrick as well, thinking it had to have been hell for him and Annie to deal with Mags’ body, given she’d been the rock that all the Four victors clung to so fiercely. He should have never figured—no, honestly he’d only desperately hoped—he’d be exempt from this particular horror. After all, Snow never did inflict something on his victors that he didn’t make sure Haymitch suffered in full.

He gave her a grim smile and said, “As if it ever was easy for any of us, Chloe.”

Finding the elevator and taking the long ride to the basement, he tried to steady himself. He’d been through this forty-six times in his life already—no, fewer than that. There had been years where both kids died in the initial melee or shortly thereafter, and the bodies arrived together, or he’d had it happen a time or two that he went down knowing they were both already dead, and the second body arrived while he was still working on the first. But that was rare; usually one kid was smart enough to run away at the gong and last at least six hours. So it had to be close to forty times he’d made this particular trip. Suddenly it seemed to matter that he figured out the exact number and he was still busy counting, only up through fourteen-year-old Meggie Jonesby and her death midway through the 59th Games, when the doors slid open and he saw there was a small figure already lying there on the prep table, draped in the usual stain-proof white sheet.

He went through the routine, signed for receipt of the body. He knew from experience that he’d be able to clean her up in case Perulla wanted an open casket funeral. There had been mutilated tributes—burned, exploded, or torn to bits—where he just signed for a sealed coffin.

Then he paused, routine broken. Was this pointless—would there even be a funeral? If things still happened as planned, there would be other things on peoples’ minds soon enough. But Perulla Everdeen would still be there in Twelve, grieving Katniss, and Haymitch knew there had been no body for her to bury when Burt died. Thirty-three Seam families got nothing back from the mines, not even a tooth or a severed finger. He’d heard rumors around the Hob for months after about the stench of decay coming from the rubble-filled shafts. He might not have worked down the shafts except those few brief weeks as a kid, and never done recovery after an explosion as many adults had, but on that day he’d been exactly the same as the rest of them—frantically digging and trying to save lives. If anyone had noticed that their “Capitol-soft” victor wasn’t fazed at all by the gruesome injuries or severed body parts uncovered, nobody had remarked on it or speculated just how close he’d gotten every summer to dead bodies in all conditions of unloveliness and indignity.

She’d never buried her husband, so he’d make certain she could bury her daughter. He tugged off the sheet and carefully folded it, setting it aside. His first move, as ever, was to shut her eyes—fucking hovercraft crews and morgue attendants couldn’t even be bothered to do _that_ much. He tried to not view her blank, wide-staring eyes glazed in death as an accusation. Katniss, in life, wasn’t at all subtle in her accusatory glance, so that helped a little. Pushing feelings aside, letting himself sink into the routine where nothing could hurt, he reached for the tray of tools. 

Cutting her wetsuit off, he looked at the wounds—the ugly sight of her broken right shin, the gaping throat wound, various cuts and scrapes. Far from the worst he’d ever dealt with. She looked so small in death, so still, vulnerable and naked there on that table. 

He’d often had the depressing thought, usually back home in Twelve seeing kids flirting with each other, that every year he tried to repair the damage done to naked bodies of kids killed too young to have ever been seen by a lover. Granted, almost none of them would have actually had sex—too young, too much risk with years of reaping still ahead. But perhaps they’d been kissed, or even had a few furtive touches out at the slag heap, or gotten as bold as to strip off upstairs in a bedroom after school and hurriedly touch a while before their parents came back from the mines. Maybe a few brave souls had even been like him and Briar as kids, out in the woods already for food, and stealing some precious hours out in sheer privacy to linger and explore while. 

Katniss hadn’t had the risk of Peeta being reaped, and they were growing closer. Whether or not they’d slept together, or even kissed in earnest rather than in a playact, was no business of his, nor did he really want to know one way or another. He’d been forced enough in his life, and had too much of his life smeared all over the television, to respect privacy. But he saw how they’d leaned on each other during the Tour and since. Peeta had gotten over his childish obsession and started to love the girl she was, flaws and all, and suspicious and off-putting as she could be, she’d softened around the boy. He hoped that in the end, she’d understood that she’d been loved, and whether or not she’d accepted it, that perhaps she’d found some of the better parts of herself that she’d obviously tucked away after Burt Everdeen died down in the mines.

Twenty-three years of practice gave him skill as he washed down her body, watching the pink-tinted water sluice off the end of the table. The dark bruises and small scratches stood out all the more starkly now. Twenty-three years of experience of the flaccid, rag-doll feel of dead flesh, lacking any of the natural tension or resistance of a living being, meant he didn’t respond with a suppressed shudder as he had for the first few years. He’d learned to shut it out when he needed, and he’d deal with it later. Tonight, maybe he ought to get well and truly drunk—no, he couldn’t. Peeta was still in there and the breakout ought to still take place tonight. He needed to stay sharp for that.

Carefully gripping Katniss’ foot, he pulled the jagged ends of the broken bone back into place, giving her leg back its normal shape and length. Then he stitched shut the torn skin there, first. Next task was to close the gaping fang wounds in her throat. Something in him half-expected her to suddenly sit up and glower at him, ready to irritably complain about clumsiness, how his stitching took longer because his hands shook. He'd barely had anything to drink since the Games began, so maybe that had something to do with it. The constant caffeine and lack of sleep didn’t help either. But the paleness of her skin and the stark black slash of stitches told him she wasn’t waking up anytime soon. The stillness of her unnerved him too. She’d always been restless, relentless.

They’d delivered the clothing he’d requested, in a neatly folded bundle on the shelf. It was in his first year with Dean and Larkspur that he’d learned to specify the clothing for laying the body out. The Capitol selection staff always went for something overdone, something that made a Twelve child unrecognizable in the end, satin and frills and garish colors, as if suffering death in the arena on the Capitol’s terms and being buried in the tribute cemetery apart from their kin wasn’t enough of a claim made. Seeder had been the one that told him he could send the clothing selections back and request something else. Ignorant and terrified boy that he’d been, still learning the confusing maze of exactly where he could act high-handed and refuse the Capitol’s notions and when he couldn’t without someone paying for it, he’d had no idea. Dean almost went home in something like a lime-green tuxedo, until Seeder told him otherwise. Seeder had come through here three days ago, he thought.

He always dressed them better than they’d had for Reaping Day, but usually simple clothing, neat in its restraint and clean lines. That was for the families. Death made enough of a stranger of a person without dressing them unfamiliarly. For Katniss that meant a simple blouse and a pair of dark trousers—he knew she’d never taken to skirts, much as she’d had to wear them in the last year. Clothes that she could almost have gone out into the woods in, because that was where she’d felt most at home.

They’d included the scarf he’d ordered. Silk dappled and streaked in various woodland shades of green, he wrapped it carefully around her throat, using it to conceal the horrific sight of the death-wound. Perulla might be a healer and more inured to these kinds of things, but there was no cause to make her see her eldest child like that.

Still working by rote, he rummaged through the rags of her arena uniform—the wetsuit now in tatters, the boots, the armband with “12” in white letters on Twelve-black ground, identifying her at a distance to friends and foes alike. He always retrieved the personal token to give back to the family, if they’d brought one. Some kids were too poor even for that, and there had been a few that came from the community home and were both too poor and had no family left to care. He still cared for them in this last rite just as the same as any other tribute.

The pin was spattered with rusty stains of dried blood—whether Katniss’ or someone else’s, or both, he wasn’t sure. But picking up a cloth, he carefully cleaned every bit of it, every nook and cranny.

It lay there in his palm, bright now with the cleaning. The mockingjay’s wings stretched out, bounded by the circle that enclosed it. There were a few small scratches in the gold, he noticed. Those hadn’t been there…

He remembered cleaning this pin once before. He’d gone up a tree for the night because he was alone again, no ally to watch his back and make sleeping on the ground safe. He’d leaned back against the trunk and carefully scrubbed this same damn pin as the sun went down, sparing a tiny bit of his precious water supply to clean it of the blood even as he couldn’t clean himself, and he must have smelled of death.

But all he could think right then, unable to fully bear the weight of her death, was that he couldn’t bring that pin back to Rab and Faydre Donner all blood-spattered. Because he’d promised Maysilee that he’d bring it back, promised her that he’d do what she couldn’t do—win the Games, he assumed at the time, but maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe she’d referred to something far, far deeper than the Hunger Games.

The past seemed to mock him with the echo: two Quarter Quells, two Twelve girls with a gold mockingjay pin dying near the end from a mutt-torn throat. At least Katniss had gone fast. Maysilee drowned in her own blood. Sometimes he still heard the sound in his nightmares.

He’d brought this same fucking pin back to the Donners twenty-five years ago. The first set of parents he’d expressed regrets to regarding the arena, but far from the last. What now? He brought the pin back to Perulla Everdeen and like he had then, swore miserably that he’d do his best to bring more Twelve kids home, and in another twenty-five years, maybe he’d take the damn thing from another dead girl, with an endless line of dead kids stretching in between?

The pin seemed to mock him— _mockingjay_ —repeating back all his failures note-perfect, all the way from Maysilee to Katniss. Katniss. He’d saved her once, and that should have been the end of it. He shouldn’t have had to endure preparing the body of a girl he’d saved once, a girl he’d come to care for because he’d _saved her life already_ , and that should have been the end of it. From _This shouldn’t have happened,_ , it was a swift and ready leap to _None of it should have ever happened._ Standing there, all of it washed over him again: the dead kids, the years of whoring, the guilt and self-loathing, the shunning in Twelve because he failed them and because he kept himself away from them for their own safety, the burning Seam house, all the way back to the Games, the Second Quell. None of it should have ever happened, and it would keep happening, again and again. He’d known that, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever really _felt_ it. 

This stupid mockingjay pin and its _déjà vu_ just drove home how utterly futile it had been to bow his head and submit, to give away everything of himself to try to do his best to keep people from getting hurt. Twenty-five years and not a single fucking thing had changed, and it never would. Not unless he finally said _no more_. The sudden, swift explosion of rage was almost overwhelming. He’d told himself for too long that anger was futile, that he couldn’t change anything. But now that the fire was lit it was going to go until it burned itself out. 

He didn’t even realize he’d clutched the pin hard enough to drive the sharp end of it into his hand, a deep wound. Despite a momentary urge to throw the damn thing, he instead put the pin down beside Katniss so he wouldn’t bleed on it again as he bandaged his hand. 

They’d put their hopes on Katniss, and even his best at carefully manipulating and plotting with Plutarch and asking his friends to die for her and getting all the pieces together to save her had been nothing at all against the Capitol’s plans. He didn’t know exactly what Plutarch planned in this contingency, but he knew that the death of one person couldn’t be the end of it. The rebellion wasn’t about the life of one girl. It was about everyone’s losses, everyone’s suffering. In that moment he decided that either way this went, he’d rather go down fighting than be down here again in another twenty-five years. 

“I’ll do my best,” he told Katniss, hoping that if there was some kind of afterlife, that she could hear him. “For the b—Peeta, to get him out alive.” She’d been so childishly naïve, thinking that a promise from Haymitch was tantamount to a guarantee that Peeta would live. She’d never sat a mentor chair, never seen how genuinely helpless a job it was. Now she never would. She’d never have to mentor, never have to lower herself to make insinuations and suggestions to sponsors, never have her body sold off, never stitch together a torn body down in this morgue, never make apologies to Twelve parents, and never find some way to cope with the searing guilt of failing a dead child. He couldn’t be grateful for it—death to escape that fate was a cold mercy. _No more._

He couldn’t tell her something dramatic like that he would make sure she hadn’t died in vain. In truth, every single Hunger Games tribute had died for nothing, and those that lived had suffered for nothing. All the Capitol films about the Games being a pageant of bravery and honor were just so much bullshit. Nobody came out of that arena wholly alive, not even the survivors. “This won’t be the end.” That seemed to be the only promise he could make her. Touching three fingers to his lips, he bid her goodbye.

Before he left to summon the attendant and have Katniss put into her coffin, he hesitated at the gleam of bright gold against the cold steel by her left shoulder. Reaching out, he took the pin. As he grabbed his jacket from the hook and shrugged it on, he slipped the pin into his pocket. His hand would heal soon enough, but the mockingjay pin would serve as his personal reminder of what was at stake.


	2. Chapter 2

The cannon shot rang out, the sound strangely distorted in the humid air and the thick jungle, a syrupy and muffled _boom_ rather than crisply carrying. Johanna couldn’t turn around to see who was down, because she was really too damn busy with fighting off a bunch of the scorpion hawks, Blight might have been useless back in Victors’ Glade, and all too frequently freaked out in the mentor’s chair, but in a fight, he proved his mettle. Surprisingly, for District Seven and its individualistic pride, they fought well together as a team. Blight stood solidly back to back with her, Wiress and Beetee contained safely within their circle, and even if he was a good ten inches taller, it didn’t matter. Her hatchets and his lumber ax turned the two of them into a solid, nearly impenetrable circle of steel. “Don’t let ‘em scratch you too deep,” he grunted, and she heard a yelp as he apparently planted his axe into one of the wolf-mutts.

There were enough grunts and curses and sounds of pain from humans and mutts alike that she didn’t know who’d fallen, or even if it was one of their group. She couldn’t let a fierce panic intrude that it might have been Finnick. But she suspected from the inhuman cry she’d heard from Peeta that it might have been him. _Shit._ Haymitch wouldn’t like that. Yeah, well, Haymitch wasn’t fucking well in here right now sweating and risking death—though she shouldn’t be that hard on the old bastard. She’d seen the recap of the Twelve reaping. It must have been nice to go to the reaping without the outcome being totally assured. 

But he’d put his money where his mouth was and tried to make his way into the arena. Not his fault the lovesick little boy shoved him aside, and not even in a noble gesture intended to save Haymitch’s ass, like old Mags did for Annie. He’d done it and made it obvious he thought Haymitch was too useless to rely upon to get the job done. Everyone else thought it was so fucking romantic of him but honestly, she’d liked Peeta less for being just one more person to belittle Haymitch so publicly—especially when he was the extra tribute who wouldn’t have even survived without Haymitch Abernathy busting his ass, and it didn’t take much to shame a man who’d been the butt of public jokes for so long, even if the fickle Capitol was starting to love him again. 

Mostly, though, she disliked him for being stupid and self-absorbed enough in his little grand gesture to not care how he was fucking both Haymitch and Katniss both over. Didn’t even realize his best bet to not make sweet Katniss Everdeen a grieving fiancée was to take the chance to keep his ass out of the arena and let Haymitch handle it, since Haymitch could clearly be trusted with Katniss’ life. Not like Peeta Mellark had been all that impressive in last year’s Games. Sure, he’d clearly played the Careers like a pro, although she saw Haymitch’s fingerprints on that too, but he’d let Katniss do all the dirty work of fighting and mostly spent his time trying to not die. Plus now he had a prosthetic leg and she’d tried to not roll her eyes at how he was regularly the one bringing up the rear because of it on the frequently uneven terrain.

She had little patience for stupid martyrs who were determined to die for no reason and who made things tougher for other people because of it. Didn’t mean she wanted Peeta dead, of course. 

Although when the fight was over and done and the cooling corpses of scorpion-hawks, wolves, mosquitoes—good thing her own arena had been based around poisonous plants, not mutts—had piled up, she heard Peeta cry out again, and her heart sank, because she knew that sound. She’d had her own heart break like that the day Snow called her back into his office and informed her that Mom, Dad, Bern, and Heike had all been in an “unfortunate accident”. It was the sound of everything that was good and hopeful in life being suddenly torn away in an instant.

She knew even before she turned and saw Peeta kneeling by the side of the still, small figure calling frantically to her that Katniss was dead. It took Finnick and Blight to pull Peeta off of her so the hovercraft could retrieve the body, and he fought them like a caged forest cat as they physically dragged him from the clearing back towards the beach. She noticed Blight did his best to turn Peeta away as the hovercraft’s claw ascended, and she liked him a little better for it.

All at once Peeta seemed to go limp, the fight leaving him, and he sagged onto Blight’s shoulder. Bringing up the rear behind them, guarding Nuts and Volts, she heard the strangled sob. “Get to the beach, Peeta, and we’ll figure it out from there,” Finnick said to him in a calm, soothing voice. “We need to get out of the jungle and we need to treat our wounds anyway.” The calmness in Finnick’s tone seemed to get through to him and Peeta took a deep breath and nodded. She’d give him credit—he sucked it up as best he could right now when it would have been altogether too easy to just huddle up beneath one of those trees and refuse to go on. Although with Katniss gone, keeping Peeta alive became even more important.

Their progress was agonizingly slow because in addition to the prosthetic leg, now Peeta had a leg wound on the other side. He leaned heavily on Finnick the entire time. She couldn’t risk asking Nuts what effect this might have on things, but the idea was in her head now—what if that hovercraft wasn’t coming? Hearing that the plan was in place had been the only bright spot in this whole shitty situation. The guilty thought of having to play out the Games as usual, and either watch Finnick die or kill him, came back, dark and unbearable.

They were exhausted from almost no sleep since the Games began. They were still dehydrated—they’d been headed into the jungle for a water tree when it all happened. How they’d been set upon by mutts in there…no, they’d counted it. That zone should have been clear. Her brain, fogged with all of it pressing down like the dark weight of a gradual and growing nightfall, couldn’t process and make sense of all of it, so she shook her head and just pushed grimly on. They hadn’t made it to the beach yet by the time the parachute drifted down, snagging in a tree. Scrambling up to get it, they set up camp on the beach as Johanna opened the bundle sent in. 

Blight and Beetee went to get water, though they stayed firmly in sight just in case the Gamemakers decided to change the rules again. Johanna’s axe stayed by her side, and Finnick’s trident by his, even as he put pressure on his bleeding arm. The water trees down this close to the beach were puny, probably from a combination of lousy, sandy soil and salt leaching into the system from the salt water because the trees weren’t high enough to be above that water table. The water carried a slightly salty flavor, so it would provoke thirst even as it quenched it. But even these poor little bastards would provide a few mouthfuls to keep them going until they could find a better supply.

She unrolled the small scrap of paper. _Stay alive. -H_ It was in bold black print rather than handwriting, of course, but even without the initial, she’d have known who sent it. This had to mean he thought the whole plan was still on. Knowing him, he probably would have sent _Sorry_ or the like to let them know they were screwed and it would come down to killing each other off. She breathed a small sigh of relief.

The back side of the paper held no further messages—not that she expected it would, as the parachute crews would have printed it. All it contained was the fair allocation indicated by the amount of sponsorship funds put into the purchase: _2 tributes District Three, 1 tribute District Four, 2 tributes District Seven, 1 tribute District Twelve_. Not that it meant a damn thing if someone chose to start a fight and hoard things by brute force, but more than once, a breakdown had helped someone fairly refuse their allies some supplies that the ally’s mentor hadn’t helped purchase. At least it wasn’t like the situations where the breakdown specified only one tribute from a district, and both of them were sitting there. That tended to get ugly with its implications.

“It’s even shares to cover everyone in the group,” she announced, seeing them eye the supplies, presumably hoping that wasn’t going to happen here. Wiress in particular looked off-balance, maybe imagining that after seeing how many obstacles in this arena there were to fight, Spark and Luma decided she might be superfluous as just another non-fighter to protect. “Everybody uses what they need.” 

She walked over to Peeta, sitting there in a miserable huddle, not even bothering to do anything about the trickle of blood dripping onto the white sands from his injured leg. “You’d better tend to that, kiddo,” she advised him, “or you’re else gonna have _two_ fake legs when you get out of here.” 

He looked up at her with an incredulous expression, and before he could say something stupid like _You might as well kill me now_ , she handed him the slip of paper, crouching beside him as he read Haymitch’s note urging him to keep going and survive. She couldn’t see any other way out of it—he had to know. Otherwise, the jittery way he was looking at all of them with raw pain right there in his eyes, he might snap at any moment and start attacking them in hopes of getting someone to kill him off, like a wounded animal lashing out and hoping that someone would end its pain. Haymitch hadn’t told them, said it was for their own safety. She’d agreed, but that was then. “Shut up and listen to me,” she said, clamping a hand on his shoulder to help grab his attention. “ _Listen._ We’re getting out of here, kid, at midnight tonight. Nuts and Volts are going to blow the forcefield and there’s a hovercraft coming to pick us up. The rebellion’s started, and we all agreed to try to keep you and…” She paused. “We agreed we’d do whatever we could to get you out of here. So don’t fuck it up and start the final fight right here. Don’t let Snow win. All right?”

He stared at her. For someone grief-stricken as he was, she had to admire how he still quickly followed along. She would have bet his fiancée—because she didn’t buy that story about marriage for a minute—would have been protesting and arguing, but he just rolled with it. “How do I know I can trust you?” His eyes narrowed, obviously remembering her reputation—oh, of course the deceptive little bitch with an axe might be spinning a web to lead him to his doom.

“Because you saw that bracelet Finnick is wearing and you know who gave it to him…and I hope Haymitch didn’t pick it because it’s ugly as shit.”

“No, our escort picked it,” he said in a monotone.

“Then no wonder he was in a hurry to get rid of it,” she said dryly. They all complained about their escorts, quietly. Haymitch made no secret of his loathing for Effie Trinket, just like Johanna complained about that asshole Gemma Waltz. When he didn’t smile back, she remembered. Maybe she’d closed herself off from things for too long, become too hard and unfeeling. It surprised her a little that she felt a kernel of guilty unease about it, between Peeta now and her inability to do much to console Finnick about Mags. _Yeah, Annie would have done it better,_ she thought wryly. 

“Look. So you know you can trust Finnick. You know Finnick trusts me, and Blight and me, we brought you Nuts and Volts, and hey, none of us have killed you yet. And we’ve had plenty of opportunity, trust me.” That was especially true on the trip out of the jungle just now with Katniss gone and unable to protect him and Peeta almost insensible.

He absorbed that, looked down at the paper in his hand again with Haymitch’s message, jaw tightening. Finally he looked up at her and nodded. “All of you are allies in this?” he asked, glancing around. The viewers at home probably figured she was forming her own little alliance with Peeta Mellark right now. Let them think that. He could get right down to the important questions rather than whining and wallowing in a feeling of betrayal, especially after the shock he’d just taken. So maybe he wasn’t as stupid as she’d thought.

She nodded, brushing her hair back behind her ear. “Of those that are left on the loose, only Chaff is with us,” she warned him. 

“District Eleven. Of couse,” Peeta muttered, more to himself than to her. 

She reached for a suture kit, seeing that Wiress was deftly stitching Finnick’s arm wound. It surprised her a little how steady she was, but when she thought about it, the woman spent most of her time messing with tiny, fiddly electronic parts in a lab in Three, didn’t she? “So let’s get your leg sewn up.” She didn’t tell him about her own experience with sutures down in the morgue. She also tried to not think of Katniss’ body, on its way there now, and how Haymitch would handle that. Everyone in Mentor Central knew it was rough on him.

They rested in the shade of a shelter of palm leaves, quickly made by Finnick. Finnick, sitting back on his haunches, eyed the group. “I’m well aware,” he said with that glib, almost oily smirk from his act, “that most of you haven’t dealt with being part of the Career pack.” He nodded to Peeta and casually twisted the knife a little with, “Well, you managed it a little while last Games, but you left it well before it got to the end, didn’t you? But it’s getting late in the Games, and at the end it comes down to everyone for themselves…”

She almost could have kissed him for that: selling the act, making it look like the usual tensions were beginning and that when they stuck together, it was purely strategic, and nobody would question it. “Yeah, and good luck hunting the pack on your own, Finn,” she said sweetly. “From what I hear, you can’t even handle a four-on-one in the bedroom, let alone the arena.”

“Too much rum, Jo darling, you know I’m only human after all,” Finnick said breezily, “and I more than satisfied the next night.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Blight grumbled, shaking his head irritably and eyeing both of them. “So we’ve got Cashmere, Gloss, Brutus, and Enobaria out there somewhere…”

“Close,” Wiress said, chewing her lower lip and showing two even, white front teeth. “The accumulation of small factors gradually overwhelms the system.”

“Thank you,” Blight said dryly.

“Care to interpret?” Finnick asked Beetee. Johanna thought his frustration was only half an act. Nobody ever seemed to get what the hell Wiress meant, speaking in riddles like she always did.

“She’s saying that they’ve been avoiding a fight but deliberately harassing us from the start and keeping us off our guard, and it’s cost us,” Peeta spoke up. “We’re tired. We can’t get as much water as we need.” Wiress nodded eagerly.

“Those four plus Chaff as well,” Beetee said. “Now, Finnick’s correct. We could just turn on each other right now. Though I imagine the survivors will be easy pickings for the pack before they turn on each other.” He smiled humorlessly. “Of course I won’t be one of them, so I do have some self-investment in keeping this alliance together as long as I can.” He nodded to Johanna.

“He’s right, though,” Blight said, handing Wiress another clamshell of water. “Cut too quickly and the whole board’s ruined.”

“I say we stick together until we take the pack out,” Johanna said.

“Of course you say that,” Finnick said, “you’re the only district left in this alliance with two fighters. Peeta just lost his district partner—you and Blight are the most likely to get through the fight together.” She knew there would be no hint of apology in his eyes if she looked. His act would be flawless, as it had to be. But she knew he regretted having to say it anyway.

“So let’s get through the other Careers first and maybe you’ll get lucky enough that Blight or I die. That’ll whittle the odds a bit for you,” she told him with a wolfish smile. 

“Then if the plan is to assure the pack’s destruction, I may be able to justify keeping us around a little while longer,” Beetee said, pushing his glasses up his nose again. “With this.” He raised the coil of wire he’d hauled around ever since the Cornucopia. Carefully he outlined a plan of using the lightning at midnight to electrocute the pack, and she only hoped people in Three and Five were fooled by it, but it sounded plausible to her.

“And just how do we know you won’t electrocute us too?” Blight asked him, raising an eyebrow. “After all, the moment the pack’s gone, you’re a potential target for any of us.”

“It’s the Games and I could do that,” Beetee said coolly. “But instead I’ll make you a deal. If Wiress and I succeed and we take out the pack without any of you losing your lives—which some of you will in an open fight—you let us take our fair share of the supplies and leave, and we’ll have an agreement that any of us will only go after Chaff until, say, eight tomorrow morning.”

“And if Chaff’s dead already?” Finnick asked.

“Sleep well for once, no monsters creeping in,” Wiress piped up. Johanna saw a few reluctant grins at that.

“If we split now they’re probably going to target you first, Finnick,” Peeta pointed out, “for not joining the pack to begin.”

“So I hedged my bets on you and Katniss instead,” Finnick said with a shrug. Then he sighed, looking at Peeta. “I’m sorry about her,” he said. “I know she was your family.”

“And Mags was yours,” Peeta said steadily, though Johanna saw the sudden shine in his blue eyes before he looked away.

“Maybe he’s on to something,” Johanna said hastily, trying to cover for Peeta, feeling weirdly like she ought to let him have that moment. Maybe she was going soft, but grief—yeah, she could relate to that. “Volts, I mean. Why don’t we all divide up the supplies before midnight and after we take down the pack, we’re all ready and we agree to go our separate ways and pick it up again in the morning?” She shrugged. “It’ll come down to one of us in the end after that.” If that hovercraft wasn’t there at midnight, they’d know the plan had failed. In that case, they’d need some supplies if they were left in the middle of nowhere, trying to hide from the Capitol. The borderlands were big enough that maybe they could hide, if only they had the makings of survival. And she’d rather everyone had something in that case, rather than risk losing some supplies in case someone died in the escape attempt.

“I’ve got no problem with it…though it’s not the usually done thing,” Finnick said, slurping down another clamshell of water from the bowl that sat in the center of their circle. The scrape of the shell on the bottom of the bowl told her that they needed more water. Of course he was right. The pack almost always turned immediately on itself and just got the bloodshed over with, rather than drawing it out. It wasn’t like the pack had actual friendships—not like this. She eyed Finnick and decided once again that she didn’t want to be the one to have to kill him.

Death clung too close to them right now, after Katniss, hanging around them like a dark and chilly shadow. All of them had to realize that they were all too mortal after the girl they were supposed to protect had died, through no fault of theirs. They’d done their best, the arena and bad luck had just fucked them in the end. But they’d been too lucky to that point, only lost Mags, and everybody—Mags Robichaux included—knew and more or less accepted the inevitability she was a goner. 

Feeling uncomfortable at even having to consider whether she’d openly trade her life for a friend and die a bad death for it, and lashing out at the position she’d been placed in, the sharp words rose easily to her tongue. “It’s not usually a bunch of former victors in here either who’ve known each other for years,” she said with a snort of derisive amusement. “Though let’s face it, this whole annual ‘let’s get together and make kids hold a public killing party’ thing is pretty unnatural to begin, isn’t it?” Let Snow and the cameras enjoy that one. It felt good to say some of the things she’d always wanted to say and not need to care. People were angry enough they might actually listen rather than just cowering in fear. “Why should we just get this over with for them? Let them watch it right until the end.” Let even the Capitol suffer this time, wailing for the victors. Not like they actually mourned the victors themselves, though, or thought that the Games were wrong. They were only upset about the loss of their precious pets.

“So be it,” Peeta answered, not quite looking at any of them, and she could see the small hitches in his shoulders that told her he was probably gritting his teeth and fighting the tears with everything in him. Wouldn’t have known it to hear his voice, though—he acted for the cameras like a professional, and while Haymitch didn’t tell her everything about his two new pets, he’d hinted that Peeta was the smarter of the two. Maybe he would have been able to survive as a victor. For now, with Katniss gone, they had to double up their defense of Peeta, because she didn’t doubt if they both died, that would be the end of it. No hovercraft, no rescue, no rebellion—just the bunch of them having to face each other over drawn weapons eventually. “Then what do we need to do until midnight?”

“Hush-a-bye,” Wiress crooned with a slight smile, as if to her own infant.

“Sleep,” Beetee agreed with a weary nod. “And certainly more water.”

As if summoned by his words, the roar of the gathering wave in the jungle sent them all scrambling to their feet. Peeta did so far more clumsily so than the rest of them and she saw Blight half-haul him up. Grabbing their things so the backwash wouldn’t carry them away, they watched the wave strike the beach. She realized with a tight feeling in her stomach that it was two wedges over from where they’d exited the jungle, not one.

They’d walked into the eight o’clock section, not the nine as they’d planned, to have over an hour to grab water and get back to the beach. The Gamemakers hadn’t fucked them over and started triggering traps at random.

She looked over at Peeta, and saw him deathly still, staring at Finnick. There was a hint of steely rage in those blue eyes and for the first time, she believed that he was capable of killing someone. She hadn’t believed it of the too-clever, too-romantic kid he’d been last Games. Finnick must have recognized it as well because she saw his grip tighten on his trident.

“Tell me, Finnick,” Peeta said in a too-quiet, too-even voice, still staring at Finnick. “You were the one that counted the zones for us. How much of an accident was it?”

Finnick was too much of a pro for the cameras to show it but of course that accusation would cut deep. Maybe in the course of a normal Games, deliberately tricking an ally into death would be a real piece of cunning, but Peeta knew Finnick was on their side now. Besides, Peeta didn’t know Finnick. He’d fought his way through his Games, straightforward. No trickery needed. He’d learned to lie, but guile didn’t come naturally to him. She breathed a sigh of relief that she’d told Peeta, because she had the feeling otherwise he would have launched right at Finnick with intent to kill, and everything would have been screwed. _You tried to keep them safe in a place where that’s not even possible,_ she thought towards Haymitch with some irritability, _and now we’re having to hurry up to fix that._ “Don’t be stupid,” she said, shaking her head. “If he wanted to bump his allies off this early, do you think he’d have walked right into the trap himself?” She gestured to Finnick’s bandaged arm. “Think that little love-tap won’t hurt him when it’s down to the final four or so? We’re all stupid tired by this point. It was an accident.”

Peeta eyed her, and then stared at Finnick again. Nobody seemed to dare to speak up or move as they all waited to see if the alliance would fracture right here on this beach, as the surf still swirled around their ankles from the wave. “All right,” he said with a curt nod of acknowledgment. “Just an accident.” Caesar and Claudius were probably in spasms of joy at this: _The first hints of suspicion enter the alliance! Is this the beginning of the rift? Will they stay together until midnight as agreed, or will a heartbroken Peeta Mellark make a new plan? Stay tuned to see what happens._

As they trudged into the trees, well aware that now they had hours of safety, she saw Finnick fall back to help Peeta. Performing an act of penance, perhaps, although as she saw him muttering quietly to the boy, she suspected he was telling Peeta about Annie as well, maybe discussing Mags too. Offering his throat by giving away his secret like that, but also trying to show that he wasn’t heartless, that he knew what it was like to love and be terrified by the risk of that. Good thing she had nobody. They’d ripped out her heart long ago and right now that was probably better. Of their group she was the only one not freaked out by ties to someone else. Finnick had Annie to worry about and he was grieving Mags. Peeta had Katniss’ death to grasp. Wiress and Beetee, best friends for years, would worry about each other. As for Blight, yeah, like she didn’t know about Clover?

Blight fell in line with her. “We’re going to have to rest most of the day,” he told her, bending his head down from having almost a foot of height on her, “because the boy can’t handle too much walking.” His dark hazel eyes were steady on hers. She remembered that in nine years she’d known him, ever since she met him and Cedrus when she walked out of the medical center after her Games, Blight’s gaze always skittered away as if he couldn’t quite look her in the eyes. She’d never heard all the details of how the Capitol had fucked him up—something pretty dark in his whoring days as she understood it—but after that he never could quite face up to the Games and reality, withdrawing and leaving the lion’s share of it to her. He’d even avoided training for the Quell, and she had no idea where he’d been for the hours she was there practicing with her axe. Nor had she really cared. She hadn’t planned for him to be of any use to her, though secretly she could admit his death would have been the loss of just one more thing in her life. Blight hadn’t been much up until the starting gong, but he was Seven, and that still meant something to her. 

But there was no hiding from it here in the raw reality of the arena, and it seemed to have ripped the curtain aside. She was surprised he’d managed to cope rather than just huddling up and crying.

She nodded, trying to not ask him where he’d been in all the years she’d maybe needed him to worry about _her_ , rather than hurrying and fobbing responsibility for her off on Haymitch as her fellow whore. Time to chew him out later, she hoped, but more pressing concerns right now. She raised her voice so the rest of the group could hear them. “Then let’s get water here and work our way up to the lightning tree after the noon strike. We can rest there and let Nuts and Volts have most of the day to do their thing.”

“Ceded ground will be quickly overrun,” Wiress pointed out.

“The pack will take the beach over quickly when they see we’re not there,” Beetee agreed. “I imagine they’re as tired as we are, so they’ll probably rest for most of the day as well. And that’ll put them right where we want them.”

Picking her way uphill, panting already and knowing she’d have to rest because black spots were dancing at the edge of her vision, she glanced back at Peeta again. “Let’s take a break and get more water. The trees will be better now that we’re away from the beach.” 

As they all collapsed in a grateful heap onto the ferns, she grabbed one of the two spiles. Finnick, with his bad arm, couldn’t easily manage the other, so he passed it to Blight. That said plenty about showing trust for the cameras—letting Seven have both of the spiles and controlling the water supply. Wiress and Beetee started talking in technical gibberish about their plan to fry things. She just hoped it was enough to blow up a forcefield. 

As she passed Peeta, she reached down for a moment, put her hand on his shoulder just for a split second and leaned down, whispering in his ear. “You’ll have time to cry for her later,” she told him. Let the audience think she was the heartless slut, busy trying to seduce the newly bereaved husband. “But don’t give them the satisfaction of seeing it and giving a play-by-play.” 

“Oh, no. They’ve got enough from me already,” Peeta muttered roughly. She could almost shake her head at his boyish illusions—he had no idea how much more they could have taken. But for him to take a blow like that and still have the brains and guts to not just mess everything up, she had to admit he wasn’t as stupid, or as self-centered, as she’d thought. 

She’d had to learn how to act for the cameras, and it was still a struggle, particularly with the choking resentment. But he clearly had camera awareness already, compared to the naïve boy of last years’ Games, and she suspected he could lie through his teeth if need be. That whole “secretly married and knocked up” interview with Caesar smacked of bullshit to her, and anyone checking to see if Katniss was knocked up would have detected it in about thirty seconds. But those who weren’t old hands at it like the victors wouldn’t have seen through it—certainly not people as dumb and shallow as Capitolites. With composure in front of a camera like that, maybe the kid could even lead this whole rebellion now. She just hoped like hell she’d get the chance to find out.

They got to the lightning tree shortly after noon, and Wiress and Beetee got to work weaving a spiderweb with that damn wire. Younger and more agile than Blight, she got roped into climbing duties again. She made the mistake of kicking off her boots like she would for climbing an actual tree, bare feet giving better purchase. 

She and Beetee already figured out a couple days ago that the tree had to be fake. Any Seven kid saw lightning-blasted trees out in the woods, and being struck every twelve hours would have reduced any real tree to splinters days ago. But she quickly found out that while the metal of the tree was textured almost exactly like bark, it was scorching hot in the sun. Falling, even a few feet, onto uneven terrain, she had the good luck to not break or sprain anything. The material of their wetsuits was too thick for her to tear it up and wind around her hands and knees for protection like she had in climbing the rough-barked trees back in her own arena. But she put her boots back on, and they had bandages. Those served well enough, even as her blistered palms throbbed for a little while from the burns she’d received and she had to focus more on each grasp of a branch in consequence.

A parachute fell as she climbed back down. Blight opened it and picked up a small jar, handing it to her. “Guess we know who this is for. No note, but then Ced’s never been chatty,” he said casually. Well, that wasn’t unexpected. She’d rarely met anyone more laconic than Cedrus Ollenheim. When she cracked the jar of the burn ointment, a small piece of paper was stuck to the inside of the lid. Carefully balancing the lid face-up on her knee to hide the note from the others, Peeta helped her smear the gooey yellow ointment on her hands. She suppressed a sigh of relief as it soothed the burns. 

It was nearly an hour later that she managed to steal a minute to read the note, pretending to get more water to address their ever-raging thirst. Written on waterproof paper, it said simply, _Make your move at midnight as we planned. -C_ He’d had to word it so carefully, reading the words out for the parachute crews and couching it in terms of standard mentor advice, but it was the best note he could have sent. 

The three words that mattered were the final ones. _As we planned._ She breathed a sigh of relief. The only planned move that Cedrus had been in on was the arrival of the Thirteen hovercraft. Good. She’d let the rest of them know it thoughout the day. Crumpling the note, she scraped out a shallow depression in the ground and buried it, covering her tracks. That way if someone used the burn ointment later today, she wouldn’t have to explain that note on-camera to them. She may have been slower at gaining the act than some, but she could never forget the need for awareness of the cameras now.


	3. Chapter 3

Haymitch didn’t have to find Plutarch. The man found him, in the bathroom, of all places. Conscious of the surveillance—nobody had ever determined whether the bathroom had camera, audio, or both, but they figured it had to be bugged in some way—he turned his head and stared at Plutarch taking the urinal right next to him. 

“Are you trying to get cuddly? I’m not into dirty hookups in a bathroom with the Head Gamemaker, so eyes where they belong, Plutarch,” Haymitch said dryly. Though it wasn’t like more than a few Capitol men and women hadn’t claimed ownership of his cock back in the day after paying Snow for the privilege. The bathrooms had also been used as a place to discuss strategy away from the ears of others in Mentor Central—the Career men in particular tended to favor that, as much chatting as they usually had to any given year. More than once he’d walked in to take a piss and surprised two or more of them into sudden silence: Niello, Jasper, Gloss, Hannibal, Brutus, Carrick, Finnick. Chantilly had told him, amused, that the Career women did it too in their bathroom: _just with less comparing of egos and cocks._

“This is me discussing this in private, Haymitch,” Plutarch said, a little too loudly. “You know I could have sent a junior Gamemaker to call you out right there in Mentor Central.”

Haymitch gave a bored snort of amusement. “What did I do, huh?”

“That last note you sent? I let it pass because I felt bad for the boy too, but really, I maybe should have refused to let it go…”

“There was nothing privileged in it,” he said. He’d sent nothing that would have told Peeta anything that came from information gained in Mentor Central’s perspective—tips about Gamemaker traps, or the plans or movements of other tributes, for example. Writing parachute notes was a fine art. He knew the rules full well, hadn’t had one slapped down in the mandatory Gamemaker review prior to a parachute dispatch in seventeen years now. “I told him to stay alive. That’s the point of the Games, isn’t it?” He couldn’t resist a small barb of sarcasm at that. Plutarch might be a part of this plan,truel and playing his dual role to the hilt. But he’d also been the one that built this oh-so-efficient arena that had killed off so many of Haymitch’s friends already. Right in that moment, the latter seemed to outweigh the former in Haymitch’s mind, and he found it very hard to forgive Plutarch Heavensbee those wasted lives. 

It passed, at least for now. If he’d learned anything in his years, it was how to let things go for the moment that served no purpose, and to try to focus on what actually might be useful. “I was trying to calm him down so he didn’t turn into a murder machine right then and there.” 

“It could be said you affected his Game, Haymitch, by doing that. Outside interference?”

“Fuck it. Whatever, Plutarch, it’s your playground, and we just do what we’re told.” Plutarch’s eyebrows rose and he shook his head slightly, telling Haymitch, _calm down_. Realizing he was on edge again, he did his best to calm down, trying to wipe it from his mind so he could do what he had to do. ”Sorry. You want to throw me in there with them as punishment?” Haymitch inquired archly, unable to resist that last bit of sarcasm.

“No,” Plutarch said. “But we’ll be watching your notes even more closely, trust me. You know how things work around here. You know the plan. Be careful and stick to it.” He gave Haymitch a direct look at those last words. With that, Haymitch headed for the sink, holding back a sigh of relief. Of course it hadn’t been about the damn note to begin with, he’d known that from the start. But Plutarch’s message was a welcome one. _You know the plan. Be careful and stick to it._ It was still on. The hovercraft was still coming for them. There might still be a chance to get some survivors out of this shit, and that meant everything. 

But it had been a warning as well. His notes would be more closely watched now—Snow probably was ratcheting down the scrutiny, wanting to hinder Haymitch in small ways and maybe get Peeta killed as well now to finish the job. Of course; Coriolanus Snow never gave up without fully cleaning house, no risks remaining. Haymitch wouldn’t have been surprised to see that antibiotics—again—would have been priced out of reach for Peeta’s leg wound again. 

Never mind all that. It wasn’t going to matter what might or might not happen in the Games, as instinctively as his brain churned through the likely scenarios. It would be done, one way or another, at midnight. Besides, in this case, Haymitch’s notes being watched like a hawk didn’t much signify. Haymitch was pretty certain Johanna had clued Peeta in, from how he hadn’t gone berserk or abandoned the alliance, instead arguing for it. Viewers at home probably thought he was playing crafty, like the Careers last year, but all the victors had seen it too. They’d grown into adulthood surrounded by strategizing and manipulations, so they wouldn’t be stupid enough to fall for the fairly amateur scheming of a seventeen-year-old boy. So Peeta had to be in on it. Good. But he still needed someone else to send the information.

He dismissed Four. It would look better coming from a district that still had both its victors in it, presumably to have a plan together. Three or Seven, and instinctively, he turned towards Seven. No insult to Beetee and Wiress, but he thought he understood Johanna and Blight more instinctively.

Stopping off at Cedrus’ station, he handed the old man some coffee. Seeing the Careers eye him, knowing that in a regular year they’d figure he was trying to set up an alliance there but that they were probably looking for clues here, he gave Chantilly a slight nod. “Plutarch says it’s still on,” he murmured to Cedrus. “Send ‘em a note, but can you make it something that they can hide for the ot…”

“I did this business for forty-odd years before Johanna’s Games,” Cedrus said gruffly. “Back even when you didn’t know the first damn thing and I was one of the ones helping you.” The blunt assertion of _butt out_ was right there, but somehow, Haymitch couldn’t take offense.

So maybe he’d been a bit of a control freak about it. But so many moving parts still, and so much was out of his hands. After what had happened earlier, he couldn’t afford to leave anything at all to chance. “Sit down and breathe, dammit,” Cedrus told him. “You look like you’re about to pass out. Nothing more you can do right now.”

“Never much of anything we can do,” he remarked sarcastically, but he turned and left Cedrus to call in the note. He passed by Cotton at the Eleven station, holding down the majority of things because even eight years later Rice was, politely, still far too fucked up from his Games to face things, and desperately wanted to ask about Chaff, hoping that his friend would find the alliance somehow. But that was no use—just one more thing that was out of his hands. 

It was an interminable hour or so that he sat at his station, seething with helpless frustration. The tributes were obviously fading. Their cracked lips from dehydration, the bags beneath their eyes from fatigue, their increasingly sluggish movements—those were obvious. But both of those were taking a mental toll as well. They were starting to make stupid mistakes. Johanna tried to climb a metal tree without protection and burned her hands, and nobody had the presence of mind beforehand to warn her. But the burn medicine drifted down on a parachute, and he trusted Cedrus to have included a note. Hopefully it was one simple enough that Johanna could puzzle it out, but one veiled enough to pass Gamemaker scrutiny.

Sitting there, watching them slowly go downhill physically and mentally, Cedrus’ remark about him looking like crap came to mind then. Yeah, he felt unsteady. He really wanted— _needed_ —another few sips of wine to help stave off the withdrawal again. He could already feel the first aches beginning, the first roiling unease in his stomach, the way the room suddenly seemed a little too hot. His brain felt like it was throbbing, sharp hot needles of pain stabbing in. Fucking idiot, after the hell he’d endured with Peeta cutting off the liquor this past spring, and the weeks and weeks of weakness—he’d been lucky to be able to drag his ass out of bed and stand for the first days of training, let alone run or attempt to throw a knife. He shouldn’t have given in on the train and started drinking. But after watching the reapings, and seeing all the friends that were going to their deaths, it was too much. No matter what happened, most of them would die in the arena. It meant losing his family all over again, the only people who still gave a damn about him, so it seemed like a drink in order to cope wasn’t that big a weakness. 

But he regretted that now, much like he regretted too many things about his entire pointless life. A few nights of drinking to cope and he was right back with the hooks dug into him but good, and he’d tried to go off the alcohol again. Only a few days of drinking, so it shouldn’t be so bad, right? Spending most of the night after everyone approached him for an alliance hung over the toiler, shaking and heaving his guts up until there was nothing coming up but thin, sour bile and his abused stomach muscles protested, sweating like a pig to boot, he knew “only a few days” had been more than enough. He’d started drinking again the next day. Just a few sips, enough to get a little booze into his system and keep his body happy, nowhere near enough to even feel the slightest buzz, let alone blissful distance from it all. He couldn’t afford that.

He could even less afford it now when with one tribute down—couldn’t think of her name, couldn’t let that in—he had to throw everything he had towards keeping the other alive for the next hours. Haymitch glanced over at Cedrus, seeing the slumped shoulders and bleary bloodshot brown eyes of a man who’d slept as little as Haymitch had over the last four days. Cedrus also was near thirty years older, poor bastard. He ought to be sitting on his porch with his husband and whittling, or whatever the hell they did in Seven for fun.

_None of us should be here_ , he reminded himself, and the fury at it, like the tremors, threatened to overwhelm him. Putting his headset down, he gave in and had a small glass of wine from the drinks table, doing his best at the same time to shove the anger down as well as the self-recriminations. It wasn’t helpful now. But he somehow still felt the weight of that gold pin in his jacket pocket as if it were somehow large and heavy as a lump of coal.

Passing back along the arc of consoles, seeing Lyme, Hannibal, Chantilly, and Niello all huddled close together discussing and knowing the pack was probably going to make a move, he tried to shake that off as well. All four of them might be supporting the rebellion, but they still had to do their utmost for their tributes as well, while hoping like hell that the pack didn’t kill off Peeta now. It was a tricky position he didn’t envy them one bit. 

He paused at Cedrus’ station again. “Quit hovering, boy, people will say we’re in love,” Cedrus muttered gruffly, brushing a hand over his bearded face with its golden skin gone craggy and toughened, making him seem almost like the trees he must have cut in his youth.

A slight, helpless smile touched Haymitch’s lips as it always did whenever one of the senior victors called him “boy”. Not many of them left in Mentor Central—even fewer now, of course. Leaning in, knowing the old man’s hearing wasn’t the best, he asked softly, “Got it?” He’d seen Johanna break off from the group, presumably for a bathroom break. He didn’t have a camera angle on Johanna himself once she’d split off from the group for some privacy to know if she’d read that note.

“She’s read it,” Cedrus told him. Haymitch breathed a sigh of relief at that. Good—he’d still bet that even sick and confused, Johanna was smart enough to figure that note out and know that it meant things were still on. 

At that point, it was nervously waiting, sitting at his station and watching the long hours of them taking care of the wire on the lightning tree, resting all too often to give their battered and exhausted bodies a chance to recharge. Night fell and the work slowed even more due to taking more care for lack of light. Trying to not drink even more, he ended up picking at the food on the buffet table, guiltily feeling like if they were dehydrated down in that arena he ought to suffer a bit along with them.

Whether it wasn’t enough alcohol in his system or the whole damn situation was getting to him, he didn’t know, but with one last lurch, his stomach announced it had endured enough. He ended up grunting to Wyandot from Ten to hold his station a minute, hurrying off to the bathroom. He might love all things blueberry, but he had to admit that blueberry muffin tasted lousy coming back up. That prickling awareness of someone there behind him fired up, and spitting one last time into the toilet, he looked over his shoulder—Niello Dumas was standing there, although he kept some distance. He’d always quickly know the ones who’d been whored out long term from the one-summer wonders, or those who escaped it entirely. The instinctive respect for distance and personal space learned by those who’d had their bodies violated regularly enough went beyond the ordinary victor caution for sneaking up on someone. Maybe Niello had stood there and watched his entire puke fest. Well, it wasn’t like Haymitch had taken the time to close to stall door, being in too much of a hurry. Although really, someone kneeling on the floor of the bathroom and retching was pretty damn obvious, so what point was there in closing the door? “Am I _really_ that popular today, Niel?” he said sarcastically, lurching to his feet with a hand braced on the stall wall to help, wiping his mouth with the back of his other hand, and heading to the sink to rinse out the taste of blueberries, wine, and bile. 

“You could have put the boy in with our pack when we offered,” Niello said loud enough for the microphones, leaning one hip against the next sink.

“You think Cash and Gloss would have fended off that wolf mutt any better?” Haymitch shook his head, avoiding looking up into his own face in the mirror, not wanting to see too many flaws and failures that would be written there. “It was shit luck, that’s all.”

“For what it’s worth, I am sorry,” Niello went on. “Of all the people out there, I get it. If it had been Tilly…”

Now he did look up, but at Niello. He’d been only five himself during Niel’s Games, but the image of the young handsome blond victor from One with his curly blond hair and strong, athletic body, did put him in mind of Peeta. Switch blue eyes for green and Niello almost could have been Peeta’s pa himself rather than Liam Mellark. The same genial demeanor was there too. And of all people out there, maybe Niello did get it. He was the only one here in the Capitol right now married to a fellow victor. He knew that most of the Careers wouldn’t risk it. Being a child of a victor was bad enough in the dark horse districts; it was almost a surety of being arena bait as a Career. Being a double legacy, as the five-year-old Dumas twins were, was almost certain doom. 

“What’s done is done,” he answered. “And I assume you ain’t here to talk an alliance. The time for partnerships is over.” He didn’t mention that Peeta was badly injured. Chances were Niello knew that already.

“No. Just wanted to say that.”

“You mean well, I get it. But Niel, you don’t know shit in this case,” Haymitch said flatly. “You never had a girl you loved get killed when you were helpless to save her, now did you?” Like most One kids admitted to the program, Niello had lived for the Games, and after that, he’d lived to please his patrons until he got too old to sell. It was only after he mentored Jasper as a younger replacement that he could retire, think about a wife. As Haymitch understood it, Niello and Chantilly had married mostly out of convenience, fulfilling expectations, and fully mutually planning to avoid having kids. Well, that hadn’t worked out so well when they were virtually ordered to do their duty by District One. He couldn’t imagine that pressure and pain and panic, but likewise Niello sure as hell couldn’t imagine mourning a lover.

“No.” Niello took a step closer, voice getting a dangerous edge and deliberately a little too loud, echoing through the bathroom with its huge mirror and its hand-painted dark blue tiles. But the look on his face was apologetic and he brushed his right ear with one forefinger—that broadcast loud and clear: _Let’s get this close and quiet, I’ve got something to tell you._ “Sure, it was sad you lost your little girlfriend when you were sixteen and yeah, it got you plenty of action in your twenties. But it’s kind of pathetic to still be trading in on that excuse when you’re past forty—great example you’re setting for Peeta here.”

The words might be meant as an act, especially that remark about his twenties when Niello damn well knew the truth about the whoring circuit from personal experience. But they carried enough truth to sting, like the poison-coated barbs of those shiny, brightly-colored butterflies in his arena so many years ago, jammed beneath the skin and the burning pain quickly spread. “Is this a motivational speech,” he said boredly, “or are you just being sore about Tilly and me screwing each other back in the day before she decided fucking Twelve trash like me was a lot of fun, but since we both knew it couldn’t be more than that, she had to be responsible and do her duty to District One by marrying you?” 

Niello kept playing his part for the surveillance—grabbed Haymitch’s shirt in one strong hand, leaned in close enough to kiss or to kill, and said lowly, “They spent the morning conferencing, figured Beetee would try to pull something with electricity—it’s his signature, after all, and they saw him pull that wire from the Cornucopia. So when your group was gone from the beach all day, they sent Enobaria to scout. She found them there at the metal tree a half hour ago. She’s on her way back to the others, and if I don’t miss my guess, they’ll hurry to ambush before the lightning strike.”

“Shit,” Haymitch cursed. Of course the Careers weren’t stupid, and they knew their quarry from plenty of experience: even Gloss, the most junior of the group, had been a mentor for ten years. Enobaria did her job well, kept quiet and distant enough that one of their group had a clue she was there—but then, they were guarding against attacks, not watchers in the distance. “And of course you can’t call them off and I can’t warn my team.” Not without trying to send a glaringly obvious note that even the parachute team could identify shouldn’t go through, no need to even have a Gamemaker review it. Even after everything, after decades of carefully laid plans just waiting for the right moment, all the lives given in that hellhole arena already, it could still fall apart right now because One and Two were playing the Games as smartly as they should, and he couldn’t do anything to prevent it. Apparently fate and Coriolanus Snow wanted him well reminded of how insignificant he actually was after how high he'd flown last year, changing things as he had.

Shoving Niello away from him, the movement fueled by the sudden surge of adrenaline, he snapped, “I’ve got better shit to do right now than deal with you being insecure because you’re coming up on fifty-five.”

Niello grabbed his arm, halting him from stalking out as was his plan. “If the timing works and they’re in the extraction point, you get our tributes out too. Agreed?”

For a moment that ready force of temper took over and it was on the tip of his tongue to say that he didn’t owe Cashmere, Gloss, Enobaria, and Brutus even so much as a broken coal shovel up the ass if they were busy trying to kill off his alliance. But it passed—they were all pawns in this bullshit, and he wouldn’t leave anyone to die in that place. “You think we can bring them around?” he asked instead. The Careers, with a few exceptions, were notoriously clannish and tended to stick to their own first. Cashmere, Gloss, and Enobaria certainly fit the bill, and Brutus was friendly enough to even dark horse victors, but everybody knew he bled Two red, first and foremost.

“No, they won’t trust you enough. So you’ll be bringing Lyme and Tilly with you in case. Hannibal and I agreed to stay behind. We can’t all four of us leave, or it looks suspicious.”

“Niel…” He shook his head, struck speechless for once in his life. Niello was right, but whether the plan failed or succeeded, Snow would likely be merciless on those right there in his grasp. Niello had to know full well he was virtually condemning himself to death by staying behind. It was pointless and even insulting to try to talk him out of it. “Dammit.”

“You’re her friend. She’ll need that,” Niello told him.

She was his friend, one of his oldest and truest. He wouldn’t have made it through those first few years without her. Not even the sex so much, though that had helped for a while as a comfort, but it was her advice and her caring that meant the most to a bewildered boy left suddenly without anyone in the world who cared, and meant far more to the man he’d become. Chantilly Forbes may not have loved Niello when she married him, but Haymitch had no doubts now that she loved the man keenly, passionately. _Push away what you might love and you’ll be able to keep it safe. Because Snow won’t know that it matters._ He could do that better than anyone else in Mentor Central. He rocked back on his heels and gave Niello the most arrogant, knowing smile he could manage, ripped right from the old days when that was his role as a whore. “Well, well. A little insecure, Niel? Worried that it was always me?”

Niello gave a short, derisive bark of laughter. “She hasn’t been in the Capitol that much since Cash’s Games, and we both know she wouldn’t have touched you the way you looked the last five years or so.” 

All right, that stung a little too, but considering that his words struck deeply, making insinuations about Chantilly’s fidelity and Niello’s manhood, it was well deserved, and far truer than what he was saying in return. “No,” he drawled the word out mockingly for a few moments, “but maybe I let myself go because I had to watch her marry a tired old man just because he was from District One and he wouldn’t ask too many questions when she did go to the Capitol. And didn’t you hear Joy Cloudmist? I’m ‘in’ again this year—lost weight and everything, so I’m making forty-one look damn good.” He’d heard that with a moment of fierce terror that it would start up all over again, imagining Snow taking on new offers for him. It hadn’t been only Katniss and Peeta that were in danger this year, Quell or not. “ _Maybe_ she and I got reacquainted earlier this week at the victor’s apartment.” Snow would never be able to prove or disprove that. They’d given the victors their own discreet apartment years ago when the Training Center and the lounge got a little too rowdy with the likes of Blight and Clover desperately taking advantage of the few short weeks a year they got to see each other. He’d met Chantilly there to discuss her role in things. Before that, the last time he’d been there was that first summer Johanna and Finnick were sold off. They weren’t fond memories. “From the look on your face, you’ve always wondered, haven’t you?”

Better than any other district, One understood the need for masks and keeping up appearances, so he could only pray Niello got what was going on and wouldn’t just punch him. “Oh, fuck you, Haymitch,” he said finally, and had it been a genuine argument, those words would have tasted of triumph to Haymitch. As was, they just carried a bitter flavor from destroying a friend’s reputation, and a good man’s name, all to try to keep them safe. He only hoped it worked.

He couldn’t resist one last barb as he stepped past Niello, who was doing his best to look simultaneously crushed and enraged. One more twist of the knife to make it clear to Snow that Haymitch loathed the man as an obstacle, would never draw him into confidence, and that anything Chantilly did was only because Haymitch had seduced her into it. As if he could ever get Chantilly to do a damn thing she didn’t want. “Good thing that I was always diligent on getting injections and that Donny and Trina were born in November, mm? No reason for doubts on that.” With that he left, hating himself all the more with a white-hot passion for what he’d just done. She’d married a much better man than him, one who’d willingly sacrifice himself for her, calmly and deliberately. So this was the glorious revolution for Panem’s freedom, blithely leaving wreckage in its wake before it ever began. 

Sighing, shaking his head and trying to throw those thoughts off, he headed back for Mentor Central. So Lyme and Chantilly too—in addition to Clover and Annie, that wasn’t so bad. So long as they didn’t all leave together, everyone except Clover had a mentoring partner who could ostensibly be taking the shift over. As for Clover, she’d been a lame duck for a while so as usual, nobody would remark her coming and going. No, he was the only problem. He still had a tribute in it, and everybody knew his habits—he would sleep on the couch in the lounge so long as that was the case.

To judge from the hovercrafts bringing back the bodies, and from what Plutarch had told him, the arena was about two hours away. So they’d need to get the hell out just before ten, and he’d worked with Clover to come up with an excuse for him to be gone for two hours. He glanced over at the One and Two stations and Lyme gave him a slight nod.

He headed for the food table again, taking the opportunity to slip a few of the more easily portable, durable things into his jacket pocket: fruit bars, cookies, and the like. Things that would hopefully help the tributes out on the hovercraft, give them a quick energy boost. He’d told Clover and Annie to do the same earlier. He heard Chantilly coming up behind him. “Niel and I put on a show for the cameras,” he murmured out of the side of his mouth, seeing her quickly catch on and start filling her own pockets with a few things—nothing that would make her pockets visibly bulge. Fortunately most of the stuff they put on the snack table was geared to be portable, so it could easily be eaten at a mentor station. “You and I are rekindling an old flame. He’ll be coming in pissed.”

She nodded and said conversationally, “And so we fight and I stalk out in a huff.”

“And I’ll hurry after you.” That was better than his plan with Clover of faking getting sick. It mattered suddenly, intensely, that he tell her that he wished it wasn’t like this, that as a friend he loathed the tawdriness of taking apart her marriage, even for show. “Til…”

“Later,” she murmured, “you don’t let yourself go to pieces now.” She brushed her hand over his and gave him a sweetly inviting look, brown eyes wide and guileless. The sharp humor and intelligence he knew characterized the real woman was gone, vanished into the role. Twenty years ago she would have made him do all the work for the camera, played completely doe-eyed and innocent, because that was her role. But what the Capitol found sexy in a young woman, they would have found pathetic in a middle-aged woman—more than pathetic, unbelievable. Even during that forced pay-to-view that was Chantilly’s last hurrah on the circuit, they’d been evolving her role, although the sweetness and shyness they put on her was as forced as the virginal innocence had been.

The glance she cast over her shoulder and the slight smile of triumph told him that Niello had come back to Mentor Central, even before the sound of his footsteps. He turned and looked at the older man as if he didn’t have a shred of shame or a care in the world, a smug smirk on his face. “Really, Chantilly,” Niello rumbled, green eyes narrowed into cat-like slits of rage, a muscle twitching in one cheek as he spoke between gritted teeth, “do you have to whore it up in front of me _again_?” He nodded to Haymitch dismissively. “And with this pathetic drunk hayseed to boot?” He gave his own victorious smile, baring his teeth at the two of them in a feral way. “Guess mining trash knows its own, though. You never could keep your hands off him when you were young enough to get away with slumming it. But you’re not twenty-five anymore.”

Chantilly let out a slight whimper and Haymitch wasn’t sure it was entirely feigned from the hitch in her breath. Camera pro she might be, but it still had to be a nightmare to have her husband so casually flinging those words in her face, even if they weren’t meant. And he knew her family had come up from One’s silver mines when she was admitted to the Career program; that background was something they had in common, at least. 

He slid an arm around her waist, as much to comfort as to continue the show. Glancing over at the mentor consoles, he saw that those who didn’t have their headphones on were currently checking out the new sideshow. Only the fact that most of them were old enough to know him, Niello, and Chantilly well enough—and were in on the rebellion to boot so they’d suspect anything said or done in such a flamboyant manner of being just obligatory duplicitous bullshit—comforted him. “Maybe she’s not getting what she needs at home,” he said casually. He tightened his arm possessively around Chantilly’s waist. She leaned into him, one hand resting possessively on his chest. It felt odd to have the warmth of another person so close to him, the soft curve of her hip beneath his hand, her breath ticking his shirt collar—so many years since he’d been touched. But the sheer sensation of her nearness crackled through him, all at once a craving for her to linger just a little longer handily beating out the awareness of the danger of having someone so close. It felt so strange to be touched like this, so casually, so kindly, and even though he clearly saw Niello looked like he wanted to find his old tomahawks and make short work of Haymitch, he wanted to linger in it just for a moment. There was nothing erotic about it; she was his friend and artificial as the situation was, they might as well have been a pair of posed marble statues. But the life and nearness of her reminded him that he was no statue. 

All at once he wanted to gather her in, cling to her and bury his face in her shoulder like a child. Hope to hell that she might tell him that he wouldn’t fail, that he could keep going and do this. Tell him that he wasn’t a disaster who turned everything he touched into ashes, because he was so fucking tired and afraid and pissed off right now, and to simply be _touched_ by another human being cut through every self-preservation he’d put in place for so many years. 

What the hell was wrong with him? It was like since the girl died, everything in him was cut open and bleeding out. _Get your shit together,_ he reminded himself. This wasn’t the time or place to lose everything because circumstances had sent him reeling. This went far beyond him, or Chantilly, or anyone else. “Jealous?” he asked Niello.

“I’m going to take you for everything,” Niello said, the air of deadly, deliberate menace that would have set any victor’s hackles on edge. “The kids? You’re never going to see them again.” 

With that, Chantilly’s voice broke. “Niel…”

Niello turned away and headed for the One station, picking up the headphones, not even turning towards the two of them as he said, “He’s not worth the fight. And it’s my shift. Go do whatever the hell you want. With whomever you want.”

She shrugged her way out of Haymitch’s embrace and took a half-step towards Niello, stretching a hand out, and he hurt to see the look on her face, as if her heart and soul were being torn in two. The tears that shone wet in her eyes and then slipped down her cheek weren’t all an act, he would bet on it. They might never see each other again, and this was the goodbye they got after close to fifteen years of marriage—a bunch of lies.

He caught her by the wrist. “Don’t go to pieces now,” he whispered in her ear, returning the favor of her advice. She nodded, and suddenly her distress was all a smoothly donned role, and the look she shot Niello now was full of spite and venom as she continued to cry. For his part, he did his best to look tender and concerned—a look he would never had let Coriolanus Snow see on his face towards anyone. He would never have let the old man know anyone mattered to him so long as they were within Snow’s grasp. As if realizing his mistake, he quickly composed his expression into something less nakedly emotional.

In short order, it was all arranged. He and Lyme would escort Chantilly, with everyone dryly understanding that he was taking an hour or two, presumably to “comfort” the distraught discarded wife. Wyandot would hold down the Twelve station until Haymitch supposedly returned. Clover slipped away, rolling her eyes and muttering about being too fed up with their asinine tacky melodrama to stick around. Annie had “gone to bed” hours ago.

He risked one last long look at the monitor on his station. Right now Peeta slept, guarded by Johanna. He wouldn’t know what was going to happen with them and the Ones and Twos, not until Beetee and Wiress either got the forcefield down—or not. Little as he could do from Mentor Central, he at least witnessed what went on. Walking away felt almost impossible. The couple of tribute ends he’d missed because he finally needed to sleep and death came too swiftly and suddenly for someone to come wake him, he felt even more like he’d failed them, like he’d let them slip away far too easily. “Call me if anything happens,” he told Wy, loud enough to be overheard by the Gameskeepers in their black berets, who seemed to relax now that they saw there wouldn’t be a brawl here between mentors.

“Will do,” Wy said nonchalantly, slipping on the headphones.

Chantilly slipped her hand in his. “Come on, Mitchie,” she said, also loud enough for the Gameskeepers. “It’s been a terrible day for you too. Just…let it go for a couple hours. You need it.”

Looking at the monitor, not having to feign the feeling of being torn in indecision, he nodded. “All right,” he said finally, hoping that Snow would buy that Haymitch’s response to losing yet another tribute was to pick a fight and then get laid. But she hadn’t been just any tribute, had she? He glanced at Peeta one last time. _Stay alive,_ he thought fiercely, as if someone he could send the message through the monitor right into the boy’s sleeping brain. _We’ll see you deal with the grief. Don’t you go get yourself killed, boy. I know how this works._  
Just like that, they walked out of Mentor Central, and up the six flights of stairs to the roof. Lyme, predictably, bounded right up them and impatiently waited for them at each landing. “This is the slowest escape ever, waiting on you two,” she muttered, arms folded over her broad chest.

“Shut up, Lyme,” Haymitch said crossly. “We don’t all have the blessing of long giraffe legs and Brutus fucking Allamand forcing us to do hours of training each day.” At least Brutus cared enough to look after the rest of them—and right now the man plotted to kill Peeta, Johanna, Finnick, and anyone else who stood in his way. Brutus might not be the cuddly type, but he respected his fellow victors enough that Haymitch had the sense this tore at him. This Quell was perverse on far too many levels. 

Yeah, well, the entire fucking nation of Panem was perverse on far too many levels. Anger, he decided, was useful. He hadn’t let himself indulge in it for far too long because all it meant was frustration that he couldn’t fight anything. In the past all he could do was submit, and then endure. But now it flowed through him, cutting through all the crap, shoving aside his hesitations and guilt and misery, driving him onward. He wouldn’t let Katniss have died for nothing. He wouldn’t have made Niello and Chantilly abase themselves for nothing. Everything had been for nothing for far too long, and he found that reaching into the wellspring of that anger and giving it room to flow gave him a steely determination to push on rather than being bogged down in hesitation and self-blame as he was wont to do. 

This was Snow’s doing, and they would make him pay. Maybe Johanna, pissed off as she always seemed, was on to something here. Anger had at least kept her from falling to pieces as he had.

Hand in his pocket, clutching the mockingjay pin again for a moment as a reminder of what was at stake—he wasn’t going to endure another twenty-five years in silence—he stepped out into the hot dry air, the painfully bright neon signs of the Capitol blazing through the night air all around them. As ever, it washed out the starlight with its garish artificiality. _I want to see the stars again,_ he thought, clutching that pin. _Somewhere that doesn’t have a damn fence around it._ Annie and Clover were there already, and on the dropped ramp of the darkened hovercraft, Plutarch waited as well. 

No turning back now. The moment that hovercraft took off, they were committed. If they were caught, no excuse could save them. Chances were even victor status wouldn’t save them from execution for treason—the entire country had seen in that arena that a victor’s life was no longer sacred. _It’ll keep going until we fight back,_ he reminded himself, refusing to be daunted by the fear, shrugging off the idea of running back down the stars and simply doing his best to salvage the wreckage by keeping Peeta alive. Not good enough, not anymore. He wasn’t going to come back next year with two more innocent kids. “Let’s do this,” he said softly, only praying that when they got there that Beetee had done his job and that there were people left alive to recover.


	4. Chapter 4

The waiting was the hardest part. At least the first time through the arena, once she’d snapped out of it and started to do what she had to do, it was all action from there on in. Or at least, she was by herself, so everything she did, whether keeping watch, fighting, getting food, or staying on the move, absorbed her attention and depended only on her schedule. Right now all she did was watch and keep a lookout, and it wore on her. 

It wasn’t like she could sleep tonight anyway, even with as numbly weary as she felt. Night fell like a swift thunderclap, with the feeble rays of sunlight that filtered through the spreading leaves and stout liana vines suddenly choked off. It was probably both the oppressive thickness of the jungle and the Gamemakers messing with the daylight cycle. For a Seven woman to think any kind of forest was dark and sinister, it meant something. After all, she’d been born in August, out in the lumber camps during logging season. Two weeks of camp duty for her mom, working with Johanna strapped to her back, and then right back to the lumbering—even as the kid-minder in camp took care of the kids too young yet for schooling, they were surrounded by the forest, started going out into it soon as they could walk.

She remembered learning the names of the trees, from the pines and spruces around the winter town to the towering redwoods and cedars in the northwest part of the district that her family cut every other year. She’d learned to stay close to the kid-minder or Mom and Dad as a small child, learned about the risks of bears and wolves and forest cats like every other Seven kid, slept in the family tent within the portable forcefields surrounding camp every night to protect the lumberjacks from the animals. But while she respected the woods and their potential for danger, she didn’t fear them. The well-groomed garden of her arena—her first arena—now, that had disoriented her with its neatly clipped hedge mazes and torturously warped topiary trees, its gazebos and marble columns. She wouldn’t have imagined she could ever feel the prickling awareness of fear tingling up and down her spine out in a forest, but in this place, she did. Because nothing here was natural—this forest was all fake bullshit controlled by a bunch of maniacs pressing their little buttons up in Central Command. The rules of nature didn’t apply, so she couldn’t trust it. 

Every time her eyes tried to slide shut, a rustle in the darkening jungle had her starting awake again. She finally gave it up for a bad job and volunteered to take watch, sitting with her back against one of the trees with her knees drawn up, feeling like she had sawdust ground into her heavy-lidded eyes.

Peeta slept, finally; like they had for Finnick with Mags, they tried to cover the best camera angles and talked a little too loud, as if she and Blight could actually follow Beetee’s long and boring explanation on electrical engineering. The lumber camps had no electricity, of course—every year people watched the nightly Games highlight reels sitting around the campfire watching a television with solar cells charged during the day, and battery backup. As for the cold months working the mills and carpentry shops in the winter town, they all just crossed their fingers and hoped the power stayed on in their workshops and cabins. Electricity might as well be magic for all anyone in Seven had permission to know about it. 

To Peeta’s credit, the kid kept his blubbering quiet. She’d done her best too when she got the news those years ago, knowing that Snow could hear her if she started screaming and crying in her room at the Training Center. Something in her had hardened to stone with that knowledge, determined to not give him the satisfaction. 

Looked like Peeta thought the same, and as she moved over to go talk to him and distract him, and keep herself awake besides, she saw that he’d huddled in on himself like a small child, reminding her just how young he really was. Her world had shattered at seventeen as well, and before the rage hit, before the realization she didn’t have the luxury of simply giving up, she’d wanted to curl up and slowly fade away into nothing too. 

She crouched beside him, looking for something to say, but gentle words of comfort stuck in her throat like splinters of bone. “Don’t give up—don’t let that asshole win,” she reminded him instead, too soft for the cameras. Besides, she’d promised Haymitch, and damned if she’d fail both times in keeping these kids alive.

A thick hiccup tore from Peeta’s throat as he choked down the sob, but he met her eyes and nodded. _Good,_ she thought, debating risking a clumsy pat on the shoulder but rejecting it. She wouldn’t let them have even that.

“Tick tock. Hope we don’t turn into pumpkins,” Wiress said with a lopsided smile as she held yet another coil of wire in place for Beetee, her hands surprisingly graceful and steady.

“Yes, it’s got to be almost midnight,” Beetee murmured in acknowledgment as he shoved his glasses up his nose yet again and reached out to take the wire from Wiress, carefully lacing and weaving it through the web he had going already.

“Almost done?” Blight rumbled with some anxiety in his voice, fingers half-curled into his palms with tension. “We’ve gotta lay the wire out to the beach if it’s going to make a proper trap, right?”  
“Of course,” Beetee answered. “I believe Johanna and Wiress are probably our swiftest runners.” He fidgeted, fingers moving nervously as he scratched behind an ear, swiped a hand across his forehead and dashed away the sweat into the sticky night air. “No watch to be sure, but…we’ll be cutting this quite close,” he muttered, half to himself.

“Down the hill!” Finnick’s sharp cry alerted her, and she turned on her heel to see them approaching through the trees. Only the vantage of the high ground and Finnick’s sharp eyes did the trick, because they’d smeared their faces, hair, and the silvery flashings on their wetsuits with mud made from the soil colored the dark red-brown of dried blood. Now that stealth wasn’t an option, they raced in for the kill.

In an instant Johanna stumbled to her feet, grabbing her hatchets, fatigue and cotton-dry tongue forgotten in the surge of adrenaline. Beetee said, calm as anything, “Ress, I need only about eighty more seconds,” and out of the corner of her eye she saw Wiress grab a machete, standing guard in front of him. The weird little Three victor actually looked fully rooted in the world for once, determined and fearsome. 

_Four on four_ , she thought, though she saw Brutus and Enobaria heading for Finnick first as Peeta still struggled to his feet. Of course they’d go after him first for throwing over the traditional One-Two-Four alliance, and if Finnick went down, Peeta went down in a hurry. She couldn’t focus on that right now—Cashmere and Gloss came her way, obviously looking for a weak point to punch through to Wiress and then Beetee from there. If the Threes died, it didn’t even matter if Peeta was alive or not, because they weren’t getting out of this arena with that forcefield up. She felt Blight there by her side, strangely relieved to finally know he had her back for once. Seeing the mud-daubed figures in front of her, well aware of One’s image of glamor and vanity, she laughed and said, “So here you are trying to kill us—it’s about time you didn’t worry about looking pretty for their cameras, Cash.”

The first bell rang out and the hair suddenly stood up on the back of her neck, skin tingling with awareness. Cashmere lunged in with an angry shout, and as Johanna’s hatchet blade clashed with Cashmere’s butterfly sword, the metal glowed with an eerie crackling blue sheen.

“I need your trident _now_!” Beetee yelled to Finnick.

“What?” Johanna didn’t see the conversation over to her right since she and Blight were currently quite busy with the Wonder Twins, and Cashmere used every inch and pound she had as advantage over Johanna ruthlessly, pressing in with every blow.

“I need it!”

“Fall back,” Blight said over his shoulder, after a grunt of effort and the ring of steel as he parried Gloss’ hookblade, “if Finnick’s weaponless and Peeta’s wounded…”

“Fuck,” she cursed, sensing it all falling apart in a hurry. “All right.” As Blight forced Gloss out towards his sister with a huge swipe of his axe and stood now by her shoulder rather than back-to-back, she watched Cashmere closely, starting to retreat blindly between parries and strikes, able to only pray that the ground beneath her feet wouldn’t betray her. One tree root, one tangle of vines, or loose patch of soil, and that was it. Her left hand trembled with weakness, from a lucky slice by Cashmere that laid her forearm open, and only by clenching her fingers with all her might did she keep hold of that hatchet. She felt the warm ooze of her own blood trickling in rivulets down her wrist and hand, making her palm slippery.

It wasn’t ideal. The four of them—herself, Blight, Peeta, and Finnick—in a semi-circle protecting Beetee and Wiress as his final guard, and that let their four opponents close in rather than keeping them isolated. If she’d had more space to _think_ she’d wonder if anyone watching this even bought the whole electrical trap thing now, but they were committed and it was simply a matter of trying to not get killed in the next few minutes—more than that, trying to keep Peeta and Beetee alive long enough to get it done.

“Your little chicken-fryer isn’t going to work, Beetee,” Brutus said calmly. “If you trigger it, you’ll probably kill us all.” Beetee obviously was in the zone because he didn’t even bother to acknowledge that.

Finnick had taken up a long stick, of all things, with a ragged sharp end where it broke off the tree. Any lumberjack knew that a falling broken limb was deadly as anything with that sharp, lance-like point. But it was crude compared to his trident and he must have been at a disadvantage. She could only see it out of the corner of her eye, stuck with Cashmere as she was, but there came a grunt and a whine, as Enobaria said in a tone that might have almost been regret, “You should have stuck with the pack, Finnick.”

Blight gave another fierce heave of the axe and buried the blade in Gloss’ chest with a sickening _thwock_ , as Johanna half-turned and saw Finnick’s tall figure crumpled in a heap, and the shadowed figures that could only be Brutus and Enobaria rapidly advancing on a limping, unsteady Peeta. “Blight!” she yelled.

“Got her,” Blight answered, yanking his axe free and turning to Cashmere, and as Johanna raced for Peeta, trying desperately not to think about Finnick lying there, maybe dead or dying, she heard Cashmere’s howl of anguish. How long had it been since Finnick sighted them? Seconds only, she thought, but it seemed like years.

She saw the tip of Brutus’ blade stabbing towards Peeta and she let out a shriek of helpless fury: _Too late toolate no no toolate_. Who the hell was that racing up behind Brutus? No, wait, what the fuck was _Chaff_ doing here? 

The air suddenly exploded around her and knocked her off her feet, everything unbearably bright. The wind knocked out of her, her heart racing, the dancing bright spots of color in her vision cleared and her heart slowed from its trip-hammer pace. She looked up to see the not the bare expanse of night sky of the arena, the darkness still eerily tinged with a hint of red, but the normal blue-black night sky with its hints of purple. There were stars up there, like when she was a child in Seven out in the forest, lying in the grass and looking up at the night sky. The sticky heat disappeared and she felt a sweet, cool wind flowing over her skin, still tingling fiercely all over from the shock, raising goosebumps in its wake.

Beetee did it. He’d found a chink in the forcefield and used Finn’s trident and the current from the lightning to blow the circuit. She smelled the sharp, acrid scent of ozone from the lightning strike, and smelling smoke, rolling half onto her side, she saw blearily that some of the vegetation was on fire. Growing up in Seven, she knew plenty about the dangers of an uncontrolled wildfire; usually it was the smoke and the heat that killed them long before the flames, and already she could feel her throat tightening, inflamed by the hot, thin, deoxygenated air. 

Gathering her thoughts she slowly pushed up to her hands and knees and saw everyone else still down on the ground. She couldn’t tell who’d been injured in combat and who’d just gotten the shit kicked out of them by the electricity, and how bad any of it was. As she looked, she saw a few of them shifted slightly, groaning. Some she couldn’t even see—they must have been blown some distance away by the force. Finnick…she couldn’t even look, couldn’t think. 

Crawling the fifteen feet or so over to Peeta took an eternity. Chaff and Brutus were crumpled together in an ungainly heap along the way, Chaff lying half on top of the burly Two man. So Chaff’s flying tackle of Brutus apparently worked. She planted a hand squarely in a sticky pool of blood—Finnick's, she thought.

Crawling and ass-scooting, dragging herself, she hurt all over, and her muscles still twitched at odd intervals. Panting by the time she got to Peeta from the exertion, she heard his panicked gasps and saw his mouth flapping open and closed frantically, as if he couldn’t suck in enough air. Dark and bloody froth, smelling of iron, bubbled up from his chest wound with every flailing breath.

“Kid,” she said, “c’mon, stay with me, damn you, don’t you…” She could see him looking up to the sky, looking past Johanna leaning over him, and along with the pain and fear, there was that dimming spark, resignation giving way to something like acceptance. She could _see_ in how his features relaxed that he’d reached the edge and might well give up. “Fuck you, she was willing to give her life for yours, so don’t you waste your life now,” she snarled, hating him for how she had to look after him first when Finnick was there dead or dying as well, hating how scared and vulnerable he looked, hating how she’d wanted to die too all those years ago, and most of all, hating Coriolanus Snow and the Capitol for making this happen. She put a hand on the wound—would that help? Should she put pressure on it or would that just hurt it more? Hesitating, hating too that she felt so fucking useless, she just kept talking, cursing him, and demanding he not give in. 

The bright light hit again and she shut her eyes, but it wasn’t the lightning this time. She looked up and saw the hovercraft there, its twin beams focused on her and Peeta’s prone form. They’d come, as promised, although as they were drawn up towards the loading bay, she had a panicked moment of worrying that it was a Capitol hovercraft, that arena security had stepped in immediately to snatch them up.

She never would have thought that Haymitch Abernathy, rumpled and unshaven, with his grey eyes shadowed hard by the dark smudges of sleeplessness, could look beautiful to her as he stared down at her. After staring back up at him for a moment and letting the blurry vision focus more, fighting the urge to say something really stupid like _So you did come_ out of sheer relief, she saw Haymitch’s eyes drop to Peeta. Those grey eyes, tired as they were, suddenly flashed with some kind of fierce emotion. “Where’s the fucking medic?” he growled, crouching down beside Johanna, and putting a hand on Peeta’s shoulder, a look of agonized indecision on his face as he obviously realized he didn’t know what to do either.

“Let’s move him away from the bay door so we can continue retrieval,” the medic, a thin, angular woman with burnt-sugar skin and large dark eyes, said, shouldering Haymitch aside. She glanced at Johanna. “The arm wound’s bad, but it’ll keep. The pneumothorax needs attention. Can you last for a few minutes?” she asked.

Trying to breathe in deep, she nodded and regretted it as it sent her stomach lurching. Puking on the deck, she shuddered, and through the tinny roaring in her ears she heard the medic barking orders to someone. Then suddenly Haymitch was there, crouched down beside her, trying to hand her a cup of water. Her hand shook still with the lingering spasms, and she was embarrassed but grateful as he figured it out and instead held the metal cup to her lips like she was some kind of fucking helpless toddler. But the water tasted too good, cool and clear with no acrid tree sap or tang of salt, so gratitude tempered the anger as she slowly sipped. She didn’t dare look up at his face, so close to her, and not just because her vision still slid and blurred a bit when she tried to focus. “Thanks,” he murmured to her, voice gruff but some edge to it that she couldn’t identify, and she felt him wrapping something around her injured arm. 

She pushed the cup away, irritated that her arms felt heavy and limp as bowed willow branches. “Others worse off coming in,” she managed, finally coming back enough to herself to want to reject the feeling that he pandered to her, made her weak. “Shit. Go make yourself useful rather than playing kid-minder.” 

Scooting backwards slowly across the rubber matting of the loading bay, the metal curve of the hull met her back. Eyes closed, head tipped back, she listened to the sounds of the recovery, feeling the soothing hum of the engines against her body like a great steady rhythmic heartbeat. Safe—she was safe now, and with any luck, Peeta would be all right too. He’d been conscious still, because she’d seen the awareness in those bloodshot blue eyes the entire way up to the hovercraft. 

Then the hovercraft suddenly lurched like a toy shaken in a child’s fist. She threw up all over herself, and it stung the back of her throat and her nose as she choked. The hot animal panic surged through her as the hovercraft shook again and she heard people shouting. They weren’t safe after all.

~~~~~~~~~~

They were south, Plutarch informed him, in the borderlands between Two and Five. He looked down from the open loading bay door and saw the vast expanses of sand below—Panem’s southwest lay there, dark underneath the stars. Finally he saw a forcefield from the outside, a finely-woven net of neon blue lines that surged and shone more brightly in spots, popping up in another place at intervals as the power diverted there. Against the night sky, the neon color lit up like a beacon, and the light illuminated the red sands around it, surrounding the arena with a bloody-colored aura. A rough shudder worked its way down his spine. The way those surges moved, and with the wayit looked like the arena slowly leaked blood, it looked like something alive, maliciously containing its prey and unwilling to give it up.

The ride was interminable, sitting there with nothing to do but think of all the dire potential results he might find, and so finally being here gave him a feeling of relief. It was equaled by the trepidation, though. No telling until midnight whether that forcefield would go down or not.

The personnel from Thirteen were brusque and impersonal. After two and a half decades of living the sickeningly odd double life of a wealthy national celebrity and a helpless Capitol slave, being ignored as if he was just another normal man of no consequence almost felt good. 

He looked down on the arena, leaned over that gaping hole a bit more, and his right hand gripped one of the handholds surrounding the hatch. They’d insisted anyone there had to wear a safety harness so they didn’t tumble through the hatch. Been the first to volunteer with the recover, of course—Plutarch did as well, but he had the sense the man was only here to see who came back alive.

The forcefield suddenly rippled, shuddered, and with a crackling explosion and a flash of light, it was gone. He shut his eyes too late and the bright spots danced across his vision, hot needles of pain stabbing behind his eyes. “Commence recovery!” someone barked behind him, yelling towards the cockpit. “How many targets identified?”

“Visual is screwed with the smoke from the burning vegetation. We have eleven heat signatures all within a 100 yard radius—some on the ground, maybe recently dead.”

Plutarch said, “Then let’s hurry and get them all.”

“Obviously the four from the pack found ‘em,” he said grimly, risking opening his eyes and finding that only a dull throb remained. He could deal with that. “That’s ten, plus…Chaff, he's the only other one out there. That makes eleven.”

“Finnick?” Annie said anxiously behind him. After he and Plutarch volunteered, they’d told the others to shut up and sit down and get out of the way.

“He’s gotta be down there,” he told her. He only hoped the man was still alive. _Recently dead._ He’d dealt with still-warm corpses down in the tribute morgue. A few of them looked like they were only sleeping and might suddenly wake up, except for bruises around their throat or blackened and blistered lips or a small neat stab wound.

The spotlights focused on two figures first, though as it passed over the others he saw them: fighting, staring in surprise, lying on the ground. As the two drew closer, pulled in towards the landing bay, he saw the tangled short dark hair with its red-dyed tips on the crouched figure, and the figure lying prone—was that hair bloody blond or bronze?

It was Peeta, gasping for air, eyes wide with terror, scarlet bubbles of foam on his chest and his lips. Haymitch almost shut his eyes, acutely remembering watching every minute of the slow dying of Markel Flintknapper in the 61st Games—took him three hours to die of a sucking chest wound like that. That fucking gurgling noise made him think of Maysilee drowning in her own blood too, and that made him think of Katniss. 

The medic took Peeta over quickly, briskly, rushing him back towards the med-bay aft. When the doors slammed shut behind her, he reluctantly managed to look away, feeling his helplessness yet again. He didn’t know how to heal the living. He didn’t know how to do anything useful—then the sound of Johanna retching broke through to him.

Seeing her huddled there, heaving and shuddering and leaning over a slimy pile of her own puke, there was at least something he could do. Just because she wasn’t at risk of dying didn’t mean that she didn’t need care. “Lyme, take over?” he asked, looking back over at her, unsnapping the harness and offering it to her. Clover and Annie would be too anxiously awaiting Blight and Finnick, and Chantilly had leaving Niello to deal with. Besides, if they pulled a One or Two up, it would be good for them to have a friendly face.

The big Two woman nodded, taking the harness from him. “I hope he’s OK,” she murmured, nodding aft.

He got a cup of water from the tank bolted to the wall, and found some clean cloths. Surreptitiously wiping up the puke, he looked at Johanna. Her eyes didn’t focus quite right, but the way she kept frowning and looking at things made him think her vision was blurry—she wasn’t blinded. The electricity obviously jolted her, though, because she couldn’t hold the cup. That left him holding it for her as she greedily drank it down, almost choking in her haste.

Of course, being Johanna, she had to reassert herself with some snark, and he risked a faint smile at seeing that sign that she’d pull through. Wrapping a cloth clumsily around her still-bleeding arm, he heard the sound of Lyme talking to someone behind him. 

Dismissed by Johanna, sure that she’d be all right for the next few minutes, he turned to see who’d come in now. Clover gave a glad cry and ran for Blight, not caring that her husband was bloody and smelled like he’d been sweating in the jungle for days on end. Blight, for his part, caught her up with enough strength to stay on his feet and hold her tight. So at least tonight gave one good result, and obviously Blight had the thing he needed the most right now. For just a moment he looked at the two of them, clinging to each other and whispering things meant only for each other’s ears, laughing and crying all at once. Nobody would ever look at him like that—nobody could. Then he saw the look of panicked worry on Annie’s face and the look of taut grief on Chantilly’s.

Lyme stayed busy talking firmly but quietly to Brutus, and Haymitch knew those two had a long-standing past that really only quit once Enobaria took Lyme’s place as the Two female mentor, and maybe Lyme finally figured out that Brutus flogged himself too hard with the stick of his own perceived disgrace to ever feel like he could propose to her. If anyone could get through to Brutus, it would be her.

“…lying all this time,” Brutus snarled at her, blue eyes flashing murderously. No, obviously he was all right enough to be enraged. Haymitch would gladly let Lyme field this one, and he thanked Niello silently for thinking ahead enough to insist on Career mentors being here for this.

Retrieving Beetee and Wiress went quickly, the two Three victors relatively uninjured and immediately looking after each other, as they always did, so Haymitch left them to it. Next, Chaff came up, unscathed but blood-spattered. “Late to the party, but I made it anyway,” he said with a laugh that rang hollow and forced, slapping Haymitch on the back. Leaning in, he said in an apologetic whisper, “Finnick went down and I got there too late to keep the boy from taking that hit. I’m sorry.”

“S’all right,” Haymitch said, shaking his head. “You did what you could.” His blood ran cold as he heard that Finnick went down—injured or dying? He tried to not look over his shoulder at Annie, imagining her round face still deeply etched with concern. Clapping Chaff on the shoulder, he told his friend quietly, “Glad you made it.” So at least he hadn’t had to watch one more friend of his die down there.

Cashmere came next, exhausted and limping. With that, Chantilly stepped in. The relationship there wasn’t as warm as Lyme and Brutus, but Cashmere wouldn’t even begin to listen, stubbornly refusing to move as she waited for Gloss.

Suddenly the hovercraft shook, sending him careening into a support post, a red-hot flash of pain going through him as his shoulder struck. “The hell was that?” called one of the grey-uniformed hovercraft crew from Thirteen, a tall and painfully thin man with dead white skin that looked like it had never seen even the faintest kiss of sunlight.

“Hostiles, five of them incoming fast,” came the report. “They’ve spotted us and we can’t cloak or shield so long as we’re sitting here on retrieval. We can outrun ‘em—they’re security transports, not fighters. But they’ve got enough firepower that if we’re not gone in the next minute, we’re not getting out of here.”

Haymitch grabbed a post as the hovercraft shook again from another shot. The lights flickered for a moment. He heard Johanna puking again behind him. Plutarch sucked in his breath, pale blue eyes narrowing. “We’re sitting ducks here. We have to go.”

Immediately Haymitch shook his head. “Fuck that, Plutarch. We’ve got people still down there—Finnick, Gloss, and Enobaria.”

“In less than a minute this entire hovercraft is going down,” Plutarch argued fiercely. “And that’ll cost us _everyone_. Peeta too. If the boy dies…”

“Yeah,” he cut Plutarch off, not wanting to hear it, not wanting to imagine Peeta dying either. He couldn’t resist the cruel cut of, “After all, sacrificing a couple more victors’ lives don’t mean much to you, if you get what you want.”

“This is about something far big—“

“Plutarch, shut the fuck up about the rebellion,” he said angrily, “or I _will_ hit you.” So maybe Plutarch was right. But how he did it so coolly, so callously, that was what rubbed Haymitch raw. The man was all about the glorious cause. A few more lives thrown away, a few more living people shattered? What did that matter? “Do what you have to do,” he added raggedly. He’d give in, as he must—fuck knew by this time he was well-trained to submit to a Capitolite’s every demand anyway—but be damned if he’d be the one to give the fatal order.

As the loading bay doors slammed shut with a clang of steel, Annie let out a heart-rending cry, eyes wide and wild, burying her face in her hands. He looked away, unable to bear it. He couldn’t be the one to try and comfort her, not when he’d just agreed to leave her boyfriend, probably dead or dying. Chantilly reached across and took her hand, murmuring something to her.

He watched Clover and Blight help Johanna to a seat, fastening her in for the ride, both of them looking after her. Beetee and Wiress obviously had each other's backs, and Chaff joined them. Cashmere carefully sat down beside Chantilly, and soon enough Chantilly’s other hand held the younger One woman’s. Lyme and Brutus sat together, talking, and Brutus’ face had already lost some of its mottled flush of anger. 

Nobody turned to him, of course. They knew better, and their own districts could look after them far better than he ever could. The throb of the engines picked up as they sped away into the night, one last shot finding the hovercraft with a faint shudder, towards the northeast and the long-hidden District Thirteen. A potential rebellion awaited; assuming that Katniss’ loss and Peeta’s hovering on the brink didn’t kill the entire thing. 

He only hoped this all had been worth it in the end. His fingers played over the mockingjay pin in his pocket. Mentally he added the names of Finnick Odair, Gloss Donovan, and Enobaria Reska to the reckoning. His own debts to those he’d failed, as well as those the Capitol owed. Nothing to be done again, except wait and try to deal with all the consequences of all the shit he could do nothing to change, and find a way to do something. Unbuckling from his seat and heading aft towards the med-bay to see how Peeta was coming along, passing Plutarch already on the hovercraft’s comm system, reporting in, he decided he’d damn well had it with his own helplessness and people who just forced their decisions on him.


	5. Chapter 5

He’d had years and years of bodies on slabs down in the tribute morgue—too many. The patients lay equally silent and still in the med-bay, bodies laid down out on the flat stretchers and strapped in across chest, waist, and knees to secure them during the hovercraft ride. The medics sedated most of them, letting them rest for those hours. Cashmere had really needed it, fighting as she had when Gloss got left behind; one of the medics had a beautiful black eye now courtesy of her right fist.

Even after all these years, about all the Capitol permitted him, as a Twelve man, to know about electricity was a fervent hope that when he turned on the light switch, it worked and he wouldn’t be left in darkness to face the horrors there. But apparently being so close to the lightning strike worked them all over worse than he’d thought—too many years of having to categorize injury on whether or not it would kill someone or whether they could last as walking wounded. They were all dehydrated, malnourished, exhausted, sunken eyes and cracked lips; that much he could see readily. But according to the medics, all of them had the signs of electrical shock to varying degrees, and that would take a while to heal up, and so they’d readily knocked them all out for further assessment. The drug-happiness bothered him a bit, but the idea of them being hurt was far worse, so he kept his mouth shut. 

He looked at Johanna, remembering her with her eyes unfocused and throwing up as her muscles twitched at odd intervals. She’d readily let them sedate her, and given how rarely Johanna Mason ever went agreeably into anything, that said plenty about her levels of pain, or confusion, or both.

But they were alive and still breathing, and Haymitch watched the gentle rise and fall of chests and stared at the neon green blips on vital signs monitors, willing them to stay that way. He glanced at the others but then kept close watch on Peeta in particular as if he feared to turn away meant the boy could quietly slip away while he wasn’t watching. The others, Chantilly and the rest, were asleep in their seats forward in the passenger compartment.

He could do nothing else but watch, so he’d watch. His head throbbed, his skin had started to crawl hours ago like colonies of ants moved beneath it, and his stomach churned. When he’d asked for a drink the crew looked at him like he was some kind of demented pervert. It wasn’t as bad as it had been during the winter, when he’d honestly thought he might die, but he found himself guiltily wishing the medics would knock him out as well.

The brisk click of shoes on the diamond-grid metal of the hovercraft deck made him want to turn instinctively, not wanting someone coming up behind him. He already knew who it would be. That sound came from expensive shoes, hand-made leather soles with the slight heel. He’d spent years and years hearing the sound of that type of shoe. He could imagine the immaculate polish on them, shined up like dark mirrors by an Avox earning shit wages on a street corner. Glistening like a facet of a chunk of anthracite coal like miners pulled from deep in the earth in the northernmost reaches of Twelve for a few weeks every summer, right after the Games. The sound of Capitol shoes, so different from the plodding, solid thud of the heavy thick-soled military boots worn by the Thirteen crew. 

He knew who it would be, so he decided to not give Plutarch the satisfaction of turning around, even as all his instincts screamed out, sharp and frightened, for him to face the potential danger and confront it—how could he offer the man the vulnerability of his back? Even as he struggled to keep himself steady and not reach for a knife that was no longer there, terror warred with his still-simmering anger and finally broke. “They say he’ll live,” he said flatly, nodding to Peeta. “So.”

“I figured I’d find you back here again—nothing to see, they’re still asleep and healing, but they’ll be all right,” Plutarch said, and even as Haymitch could hear the attempt at sympathy in his tone, the matter-of-fact words still made him bristle. Plutarch didn’t understand anything at all, and he went on, “And unfortunately, now we’ve got a lot to talk over before we get to District Thirteen.”

“They’re alive,” he said, shaking his head, “but if you think they’ll be OK—especially the boy—you’re deluded.”

“Of course. But we have to settle where we’re going with this, Haymitch, and we had his role in things pretty clearly drawn up. Without the Mockingjay,” Haymitch noticed wryly that Plutarch didn’t refer to her by name, “he might have to step up and take her place…maybe he’ll do it in her name?”

Now he did glance over his shoulder at Plutarch, turning to face him, suddenly furious. If the boy was anything at all like Haymitch’s sixteen-year-old self, he’d be lucky to not want to huddle in a corner crying all damn day when he woke up.

Plutarch actually interpreted the angry look of _You must be fucking kidding_ correctly and laid off that train of thought. To see how easily Plutarch leaped to seize another person and use them—that was the step too far. “Fucking hell, Heavensbee” he exploded. “Her name was _Katniss Everdeen_ , damn you. We’re all just little bits in a machine to you, ain’t we? If not her, maybe some other kid would have caught your eye. The rest, well, they’re just unfortunate losses. Just how many Games have you been a Gamemaker for now?” He’d started as an aide, of course, back when Haymitch himself was new.

“Fourteen,” Plutarch said without flinching.

“Well, that’s over three hundred kids that died on your watch…that you helped kill.” That was over three hundred children that Plutarch had helped kill—he was a Gamemaker. Over the years he’d designed traps, mutts, implemented so many ways to die. Watching, waiting; it was bad enough to simply sit by out of a helpless inability to do anything, much as Haymitch did every year, but Plutarch had taken an active role. Perhaps this year’s Quell arena wasn’t as much of a total mindfuck as the Second Quell had been, but it was still a mindfuck anyway. And everything that went into that arena, helpful or not, carried Plutarch’s approval on its inclusion. Plutarch Heavensbee brought back those old mutts and their nightmares for the victors trapped there. Plutarch Heavensbee stocked the Cornucopia with nothing but murderous weaponry. Plutarch Heavensbee had approved those jabberjays, approved programming them with specific voices as a torture. “I suppose one more doesn’t matter much.”

“It matters very much,” Plutarch protested in exasperation. “I did what I had to do, Haymitch. I lived all those years trying to be in the best position possible to make a rebellion happen. I had to produce a Quell that wouldn’t raise any suspicions. There were expectations. No food in the Cornucopia. Psychological obstacles. Spectacle. An unpredictable environment. You, of all people…you went through a Quell yourself, you know that I had to at least come _close_ to that level—at least the fact that it was victors and that provided spectacle let me dial it down some.”

The patient condescension, that eternal fucking condescension, was what did it. Maybe Heavensbee started out from this mysterious District Thirteen, but he’d become Capitol enough to smile patronizingly at Haymitch, expecting him to understand his hardships even as he cheerfully reminded Haymitch of the most horrifying three weeks of his life. Before he’d even thought, he reacted, gripped Plutarch’s beautifully cut jacket in his fist, the material of it soft beneath his fingers. The fabric had One silk in it, he was sure. “Tell me,” he said softly. He’d killed before, to preserve his own life, but he now understood the white-hot urge to do murder, his body shivering with the force of it. “We both know that Quell card it was no coincidence. They couldn’t have known all those years ago that every single district would have at least three victors by that point. They couldn’t have planned on it. What was originally scheduled for the Third Quell?”

Ever since the train-ride home to Twelve that long-ago summer, the arena fresh in his mind and soul, he’d begun imagining what terrors were in store in twenty-five years. Back then, stupid as only a child could be, he’d prayed that somehow he’d break Twelve’s lousy record and mentor some victors and that somehow things would change by then and the Third Quell tributes would have a chance. As the years went on the clearer it became that nothing would change and that come the 75th, he’d be sitting in that mentor chair alone. The more Games he saw the more he imagined that crisp envelope that would destroy the lives of two more kids in an over-the-top pageant of horror. Would it be taking only the smartest kids, the most skilled, the youngest? Would they let the Capitol vote for the tributes? Only taking kids born on certain anniversaries of the first rebellion—the signing of the Treaty of the Treason, the date of the first shots fired or the districts’ surrender? 

For so many years, he was the only still-living survivor of a Quarter Quell, because Harvest Anderson had killed herself. Not like he’d done her much better with how he’d turned into a worthless drunk piece of shit. Imagining what one poor little bastard would endure to join him and Harvest in that distinction, and how it would fuck them up more than most victors—well, it had haunted his nightmares for so long that even knowing, supposedly, that he’d hand mentoring over to Katniss and Peeta for the 75th, didn’t help one damn bit.

“I didn’t look before I destroyed it,” Plutarch answered, looking disconcerted at Haymitch right in his face, angry and challenging. “Does it matter? What matters now is how we try to salvage this rebellion.”

He let out a tight, angry laugh, more like a growl ripped from his throat. His decades-long fear was so easily dismissed. Of course it hadn’t mattered to Plutarch, to the point he didn’t bother to open the envelope. It only mattered to the kids who would have died in there. It only mattered to the victors who had died in those children’s stead, and their families, the people Plutarch had blithely condemned. “No, I suppose it doesn’t matter, does it? Congratulations. You successfully killed off the girl you sacrificed so many other victors trying to keep alive. Might as well have let her die—Snow likes privacy for his ‘accidents’, after all, so at least then it would have just been an unfortunate tragedy. No, you had to kill her on _fucking national television_ along with all the rest of them where everyone could see it and have it driven home into their skulls,” he forcefully tapped Plutarch’s temple with his finger, “that the Capitol can just take what it wants and we can’t do a damn thing about it.” 

And no other victors would have had to die as well. Plutarch’s damn gambit, revealed to Haymitch at the exact same time as everyone else in the country on live television—so much for them being equals in this rebellion. Plutarch had fucked him, fucked everyone, and then he’d done his best to kill Katniss anyway. “'This wasn't my plan. This was me salvaging what I could from what you threw on me. If the rebellion fails, if everyone believes now that we’ve got no chance, it’s on _you_ , Plutarch.”

Something crumpled for a moment in Plutarch’s face, as if this was the last thing he’d expected, and the attack stunned him. Haymitch could still hardly believe he’d done it. People didn’t challenge Gamemakers. He’d gotten away with it last year because he’d moved swiftly to protect the kids, and damn the consequences, and his anger got the better of him there. It seemed sad and pointless now that he’d shouted the Gamemakers down about their plan of giving Katniss bigger breasts, but at the time all he could think was that was how it started, with them “fixing” people. They’d injected him with growth drugs while he was unconscious, and even if he hadn’t quite made that pleasing six foot mark, he was tall enough that it kept the patrons interested. She’d never be a whore now but they’d claimed her body all the same. 

The spiral of nausea suddenly hit him, dizzying and swift. He’d challenged a Capitolite, threatened him, yelled at him. Someone would die for this, wouldn’t they? But punching through that was the fierce thought, _Not my fault, not my fault, it’s him>u._ What more could he have done for Katniss? It was Plutarch’s mutts, Plutarch’s arena, Plutarch’s plan. Much as he’d been involved in planning the rebellion to that point, much as they’d talked as equal conspirators during the Victory Tour, things changed after that. Whatever Snow had said to his Gamemaker meant that by April, Plutarch acted decisively and alone. He inflicted the thing on Haymitch and expected him to deal with it. Haymitch became just a pawn in it, in the end, like everyone else. Even as he’d kept Katniss and Peeta blind from things, he’d been a puppet himself. Fuck. Yes, it was for the best, keeping them safe in their ignorance, but furious as he was at Plutarch for doing the same to him, Haymitch thought that he’d be lucky if the boy didn’t want to kill him.

It changed everything, though. Twenty-five years of blame didn’t just slough off like splitting open the husk of an old, outgrown carapace that restricted him. He couldn’t dismiss all the guilt and shame and doubt with a wave of his hand. It hung there like a thick pool of tar, dark and clinging. But this one…Katniss wasn’t his fault. So he felt like he’d reached the shallows and could trudge on, whereas before he’d barely kept his head above it most days.

He recovered quickly enough, though the automatic tingling fear remained that somehow, he’d pay for that defiance. Though he honestly wasn’t sure he gave a damn. What else could they take from him now? He sensed Plutarch’s anxiety as he gave no immediate answer, and instead half-turned to look again in the med-bay. The medics kept a hawk-like watch on, but he couldn’t bear to leave them. Right now he also couldn’t bear to go try to deal with the shattered lives up in the passenger area, grieving for those left behind. He had the bitter choking taste of his own grief right now. He couldn’t make room to take on anyone else’s, without wanting to drink himself either unconscious or dead.

In the end, it was Plutarch’s plan. But Haymitch wasn’t contrary enough to screw it over just to make a point. Too many people had died already, the districts were restless, and Snow wouldn’t be merciful to even the hint of a rebellion. He had little doubt that if he surrendered, Snow would have him executed. Haymitch had stopped being the good, scared, obedient little victor that he’d become as a frightened child, and showed the man that he was indeed the sharp threat that Snow perceived all those years ago. No chance he would be allowed to live. Not much reason to want that anyway—living was no mercy. Better by far to carry on and give it his all. If it cost him his own life, only fair. To fight, and to win, was the only way those lost and shattered lives could remotely be worth the cost. If they folded now and just crept home in defeat and accepted Snow’s punishment, all of them have died for nothing. There had been more than enough of wasted lives. So he’d fight. For Seeder. For Woof. For Mags. For the ones left behind. For forty-six innocent Twelve kids after him, and three alongside him, and ninety-seven before him. For Katniss. 

Calmer now, though the determination of his anger kept burning within him like a steady flame, he looked again at Plutarch. “You’re right, though. When we get to Thirteen we’d better have an alternate plan. Because if we get there and tell them that we have no clue…”

“It won’t go well,” Plutarch answered, meeting Haymitch’s eyes still. “So, you’re still in?”

“Oh, don’t worry, we’re allies,” he said, giving Plutarch a sharp-edged smile, sure the man couldn’t interpret the nuances of that as only someone who’d endured the arena could. Allies pulled together for a while in the arena, but in the end, they either parted ways agreeably or fucked each other over. He’d trusted Maysilee, made her his friend in those weeks in the arena, before it had to end. He thought of Plutarch more like a fellow member of some kind of a Career pack—strong and useful, but not to be trusted. Alliances lasted until they outlived their usefulness. Friendships went beyond that. His ally had coolly and uselessly sacrificed his friends, and Haymitch wouldn’t forget that, or forgive it, in a hurry.

“You don’t think Peeta will be up to it?”

“No.” He wouldn’t put that on Peeta’s shoulders, not reeling from such a loss. “The medics say he’ll be a long time recovering,” he added, to give it more weight. “They think it’s likely he might lose the other leg.” If that wasn’t a sick irony, Haymitch wasn’t quite sure what fit the bill. He couldn’t resist adding pointedly, “Guess those mutt bites were venomous.” Just one more toll laid on Plutarch’s little Quell murder and mayhem factory.

Of course Plutarch didn’t respond to that, brushing past it impatiently and moving on. “Then I think we have another option.” Haymitch looked where Plutarch’s gaze fell, to blood-streaked brown hair and the unsettling deathly stillness of a woman he’d never seen without the tension of suppressed energy and a snarky word on her lips. 

“Johanna?” he said doubtfully. “Plutarch, you been drinking?” No offense to Johanna—she was a solid friend. But he knew that prior to last year, the country hated him as well. So he wouldn’t call her publicly appealing. Then again, Katniss had been an utter pain in the ass more than often enough, sullen and contrary, although she hadn’t been working against years of national coverage establishing that fact.

“She’s the next best option we have, Haymitch. She stood there and challenged the president directly. On national television. Which is something not even Katniss Everdeen managed.”

 _Oh, so you do remember her name,_ he thought sourly. “Yeah, she did do that.” He’d sat there in admiration for it, even as he worried what it would cost someone. Johanna had always had far more guts than sense. “Point. For someone to rally around, that ain’t a bad angle.” He could see that her message would appeal. People were angry and they’d lost too much. In a way, that might well ready them for war more than the mild, chaste, idealized story of the star-crossed lovers would. He’d stood there more than once on the Victory Tour and been cynical that anyone not Capitol could find something real in all that softly lit, dramatic, Capitol-gussied fairy-tale bullshit. But as a defense against rebellion, painting them as simply two self-absorbed teenagers focused on romance and no thought at all towards the world they lived in had seemed the best course, until he found out that Snow and Plutarch stabbed them all in the back.

“Good,” Plutarch said with a soft exhalation of obvious relief. “We only have an hour or so before we get to Thirteen, and we’ve got absolutely no time to spare. The medics can wake her up quickly enough, and we need to talk to her, of course, and tell her…”

Haymitch started shaking his head vehemently, sighing in exasperation himself. “You’re not telling her anything.” He abruptly cut Plutarch off. “You can _ask_ her.” He glanced in at Johanna, thinking better of it. “No, on second thought, you let me talk to her about it.”

“Haymitch…”

“You really want to waste what little time we’ve got trying to dictate to her when you’re the one that helped put her in that arena? You’ll be lucky if she doesn’t tell you to go fuck yourself hard with your own lightning tree.” Johanna Mason wouldn’t listen to anything any Capitolite had to say, let alone the Head Gamemaker, especially not when she was fresh from the arena, and raw from leaving her best friend behind. Of that, he was damn sure. “Actually, here are my terms on things. I help this rebellion as best I can, as long as I can. I think you know that’s going to help you. But anything to do with the victors—it goes through me first and I take it to them.” 

Maybe there was a bit of arrogance in giving the appearance that he spoke for them, but all he could think was that he couldn’t leave them twisting in the wind, ripe for Plutarch or whoever these shadowy Thirteen allies might be to come manipulate them. He could serve as that buffer and argue things, get the best terms possible, and hopefully talk to the others as someone who understood, rather than talking cold necessities that came across as mandates. “That’ll help you out too. I can sell ‘em on things in a way you definitely can’t.” That wasn’t quite a lie, although he definitely spun it to sound like he was more on Plutarch’s side than he was.

Plutarch looked at him for a time, endless seconds ticking by. Only the hum of the engines and the beep of some machinery broke the silence. “Done,” he said finally, nodding. “You’re right. It’ll be easier for you victors to have a single spokesman—a liaison of sorts. And you’re senior enough, and friends with most of them, that they’ll accept your authority on it. The other victors always respected you deeply anyway.” He spoke that observation with the confidence of a man who’d observed firsthand the dynamics of the victors for over a quarter of a century.

“Fine,” Haymitch said brusquely. “You get the medics to wake her up. She needs to be clear-minded for this, but whatever pain meds she can have, she gets ‘em. No questions.”

“I’ll have to leave that up to the medics. Their patients, their supplies.”

“I really don’t give a fuck. Just get it done. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” 

“Where are you going?” Plutarch called as Haymitch headed forward.

“I’m going to go take a piss, Plutarch, or do I need permission now?” he inquired sarcastically. Whether it was withdrawal, guilt, or stress, it all had come to a head again. Fortunately he made it into the tiny toilet, all chrome and molded plastic and a harsh fluorescent light. He made an effort to yank the door shut behind him hastily before he threw up.

Still kneeling, waiting to see if a second spasm might happen, he rested his forehead on his hands and stifled a groan. He definitely preferred being drunk. “You look like you could use a good drink.”

“No shit, Blight,” he said, the words muffled down into the toilet. He lifted his head and turned it to look back over his shoulder to see that apparently he hadn’t closed the door enough, “But apparently we got the booze-free flight today.” 

That got an appreciative laugh out of Blight, who offered him a hand. Haymitch took it, hauling himself to his feet. Splashing lukewarm water from the sink on his face and rinsing out his mouth, he didn’t look at himself in the mirror. He never did. No point to it. “With Katniss gone and Peeta out of commission, it sounds like we’re pinning our hopes on Johanna,” he said, looking over at Blight. 

“Johanna?” Blight’s eyes went wide in surprise and then narrowed to a squint of looking like thinking was a massive effort. The man wasn’t nearly as stupid as the “brawny dumb well-meaning lumberjack” role the Capitol had foisted on him, but of course that little tic was so well-trained as to be instinctive. “Mm.”

“I’m gonna talk to her. Unless you want to take over.”

Blight gave a gruff laugh. “Let’s not kid ourselves. You know she’s got nothing to do with me.”

“You hung her out to dry when she was just a kid,” Haymitch pointed out, seeing no towel and wiping his hands dry on his trousers. “What the fuck do you expect?” He raised a hand to silence Blight’s protests, though from the guilty look twisting Blight’s features, he thought there might not be any. “Look, I know what happened. And what they did to you. And I ain’t one to lecture about fucking things up when it comes to things you just can’t face.” The last few years before Katniss and Peeta, and how he’d been unable to bear any of it, spoke loud and clear for that. “But it meant up in Mentor Central and with the sponsors, Ced got left picking up the slack, and then Johanna. She has a right to be pissed.”

“I never said she didn’t.”

“And I’m pissed too, you asshole. You totally fobbed her off on me because you couldn’t cope, and you couldn’t face her once they turned her into a whore. So she became my responsibility. Like I didn’t have enough shit to deal with already?” Especially not a seventeen-year-old girl who’d been drowning after her Games and her family’s murder, foisted on a thirty-three-year-old who’d long since slipped under the surface. Especially not when he’d seen she needed more than he could give her.

Blight took that stoically. Even if Haymitch hadn’t ever said it so bluntly to him, he had the feeling Blight had always known that he’d owed Haymitch. “What do you want from me?”

“Do better this time,” Haymitch told him bluntly. “You and Clover are the only ones that made it out of the arena or Mentor Central without someone dead or left behind. You need to be the strong ones right now and help look after the others. So you’re gonna have to step up.”

“Trying to shut it all out didn’t do anything,” Blight said with a sigh, closing his eyes, running a hand through the short spikes of his oak-brown hair. “Kids still died. I ended up back in the arena. So…I’ll try. That’s the best I can give you.”

He nodded, acknowledging that. “All right. For what it’s worth,” he said, “you worked together in the arena. You were there for her then. Work with that.” He’d do the best he could for all the victors, but he couldn’t do it alone. Especially for Johanna, if she was taking on the stress of the role Plutarch wanted, and after leaving Finnick behind.

An awkward smile and a grunt of acknowledgement answered him. “She’s not a scared kid anymore. I guess if nothing else, this made me see it. That makes it easier.”

 _No, she’s not,_ Haymitch thought. Though it hit him with some chagrin a few moments later—maybe he hadn’t seen it himself that she wasn’t a girl any longer. She’d always seemed liked the pesky little sister, hanging around him and demanding things he couldn’t really give, unable to grow up and move on and find actual friends and a better life. She might not be asking him for a fuck, but underneath the sass and rage, he knew that she wanted some kind of comfort or reassurance. Not much comfort to give: _Your life is shit and it’s going to be that way. Your district keeps you at a distance, you’ve chased most everyone else away because you can’t bear to care and then make them a target, and every year your tributes will die. This is your life._ Maybe she’d been smarter than him, though, maybe it was better to be feared than become an object of derision. 

Finnick had moved away from her to the point he was sure there were things she couldn’t confide in him—he was too nice, too pure still. The Capitol hadn’t managed to corrupt the heart of him into worm-riddled rot. Normal people didn’t seek out drinks and bitching sessions with lousy bastards fifteen years their senior, simply for lack of anyone else they trusted. At nearly twenty-six, it seemed like she was still exactly the same as she’d been for years: angry at the world, aggressively sexual, and slowly bleeding out underneath that veneer of not caring. Maybe he’d seen her as that scared and pissed off kid for too long as well for lack of anything progressing in her life, and maybe he’d been pissed off enough at her determinedly being hellbound to not want to see it. He could compare her now against Katniss and see that no, she wasn’t seventeen anymore. The girl she’d been wouldn’t have dared to challenge Coriolanus Snow.

“If she doesn’t rip you to shreds,” he said dryly. 

“There is that.”

Plutarch appeared just then, obviously looking for Haymitch. “She’s awake. They’ve told her that you want to talk to her. The captain offered the mess for you two to talk. She’s there already.”

It crossed his mind to ask what exactly she’d said in response to that, but he dismissed it. Better to hear things straight from her. “Thanks,” he acknowledged. At least Plutarch had thought ahead enough to get them somewhere private to chat, and Haymitch wouldn’t have to stare at an unconscious, barely stabilized Peeta the whole time. But he quickly covered the gratitude with an offhand comment of, “Any chance of getting some coffee? I’m running on no sleep.” And if nothing else, the caffeine buzz seemingly helped counteract the constant low-level nausea and the shakes—he’d found that out last year.

“Apparently,” Plutarch said dryly, “in the years I’ve been away from Thirteen, they’ve gotten rid of coffee as an addictive stimulant. Believe me, I wasn’t happy either.”

He stared at Plutarch. “Who the fuck _are_ these people?” he muttered, feeling a sense of trepidation creep in. No, far better they all present a united front and a plan when they got there. “If I were you, I’d have the next plan ready to go in case she doesn’t agree.” With that, he followed the placard helpfully directing him up one level towards _Mess_. That word seemed only appropriate for the state of things right now. He only hoped there was a way to turn the whole clusterfuck around.


	6. Chapter 6

She’d hurt enough, every cell in her body screaming in raw pain and burning with the heat of the lightning and the flames, to let them sedate her. Finally, for the first time in days she could sleep, and trust that the drugs might make it dreamless. The last thought she had as her eyelids grew oak-heavy, was that she could actually _feel_ the morphling blissfully cool as it rushed through her veins, soothing the heat.

So when she abruptly woke up, feeling the pain dulled but still there, she felt cheated. That lasted the split-second to see someone looming over her, and she instinctively tried to kick up at them and use her hands to scrabble backwards, but she was tied down, and her mind started to go dark in an entirely different way. Pinned, unable to escape, something feral and terrified in her howled _danger danger can’t get away can’t fight_.

“Settle _down_ , Mason, or I’m giving you an antipsychotic!” The voice was low and female, with an oddly nasal accent that she couldn’t place, like someone speaking with a badly broken nose. 

The word _antipsychotic_ cut through the fog, along with finally placing the accent. The hovercraft—District Thirteen. She looked up at Nosy, seeing the almost translucently pale skin, the short-cropped hair like the deep red-brown shade of black cherries. “I’m not crazy,” she gritted out angrily, peering down her body to see thick leather straps holding her down, mentally adding _you bitch_ to that. “Now get these fucking things off me.” She’d had more than enough of being tied down by people who had that as their idea of fun, so it felt like all she could do to lie still while Nosy hovered over her—too close—undoing the snaps of the straps.

Irritated at needing help to sit up, she looked around to see the others still peacefully conked out, strapped down as well. “The straps are for your safety,” Nosy explained with the condescending patience that people used with small children and total morons. “Against turbulence while we’re en route.”

“Yeah, fine,” she said breezily, trying to sound nonchalant and dismissive. “So, naptime’s over for me, but not them?” She nodded to the others and immediately regretted it as it set her head spinning. Putting her head in her hands, she tried to not heave, willing her stomach to stay put.

“Abernathy wants to talk to you in the mess before we get to Thirteen.”

She snorted, spreading her fingers enough to look at Nosy. “What’s that asshole want with me?” She couldn’t resist looking at Peeta, to reassure herself he was still alive. He looked like shit, almost as pale as Nosy, but they had him hooked up to a vital signs monitor, and that reassured her. No, he wasn’t going to rip her for Peeta dying. So what was the topic? Katniss? “Yeah. Great. We’ll chat.” Gripping the edge of the table, ignoring the screams of protest running through her abused body, she looked down at herself. There were odd red marks on her arms beneath the short sleeves of her drab grey hospital gown, running down to her hands and branching out into forked lines like ferns, or willow branches. They reminded her of the red painted designs that Lizzie Takhar told her that brides wore on their hands and arms in Six, all delicate curls and dots and spirals. But these were jagged angry lines, interspersed with a few raw blistered patches from the burning jungle. She wore marks of pain and death, not marriage; story of her life.

“Lightning burns,” Nosy told her, breaking Johanna out of her dazed trance. “They’ll clear up in a few days.”

“Oh good, don’t want my next boyfriend thinking I’ve turned into a freakshow,” she said with a smirk. “All right, where’s the mess?”

Nosy insisted on following her there, which made Johanna all the more determined to make it under her own power. Still, by the time she’d gone up the single flight of stairs, she was exhausted, a sheen of sweat on her skin. Plutarch Heavensbee at least had the wits of a rabid squirrel and made himself scarce, because she wouldn’t soon forget that he’d put her in that fucking arena, and she was fairly sure it wasn’t a delusion that he and Haymitch had been yelling at each other. The fact that she saw Finnick wasn’t there along with the others proved it. Enobaria and Gloss, well, fuck them anyway. But Finnick…she gripped the edge of the table tightly, willing her eyes to stay dry. She wouldn’t let them see her cry. 

Bland grey walls with nothing hung on them, she noticed, forcing herself to pay attention to _anything_ as a distraction. Bland grey table too, with not even the faint personalization of the odd doodle or knife-carving. It was like the mass-produced shit the carpentry shops turned out for the districts in quantity every winter—particle-board with a pine veneer, cheap trash that wore out every few years, presumably to keep people in the districts spending money they could ill afford. Even though most people couldn’t afford better in their own homes, aside from whatever traditional wedding furniture they’d either built or inherited, at least they tried to personalize a crappy kitchen table or the like with some carving. 

It was like human beings didn’t even live in this sterile, colorless place; like nothing could live here. It was nothing like the too-colorful, riotous world of an arena in its sudden and stark violence, more like a slow soul-sucking bleed that would eventually send a person into a sleep where they’d never wake. It sent a shudder down her spine. She’d gotten angry, stayed angry, just so she wouldn’t become numb. She’d seen what twenty-plus years of all of it had done to Haymitch and how he’d given up, she’d seen Max and Poppy from Six and how distant and fucked up they were, and it scared the hell out of her.

They’d thrown someone’s button-down shirt—grey—over her backless hospital gown—also grey. So at least she hadn’t needed to shuffle through the hovercraft with Nosy as her crutch and her ass hanging out. Someone tall must have owned the shirt, because it was long enough that the shirttail fell nearly to the hem of the gown at her knees.

As she sat down on the bench with its sticky black vinyl upholstery, if only to have something to do she rotated the metal caddy bolted in the center of the table that held napkins and silverware, and rings that she assumed would hold cups. No salt and pepper shakers or the like. Busy turning it, trying to shut out the pain and the thought of Finnick down on the ground and Peeta’s resigned expression and all of it, she became aware far later than usual of someone nearby.

He’d still kept his distance rather than invading her space, but it still pissed her off and it made her wonder how long he’d been standing there. Her vision was clear enough now to look at Haymitch—the scruffy and unshaven cheeks, the shaggy jaw length dark hair, the bloodshot eyes, the bleariness and exhaustion in his expression that made him look like he was the one who’d been plucked from the arena and just woke up in the med-bay. Unsettled and feeling so raw still, she instinctively lashed out. “Well, you look like shit,” she observed derisively. “Late nights cuddling the whiskey bottle again?”

Then she immediately felt like a bitch remembering that he’d lost one tribute and that the other barely pulled through. But she wouldn’t—couldn’t—apologize. “Fuck you, Johanna, I’m not playing this game,” he said harshly, sitting down across from her and staring right at her. “Hasn’t been a pleasant few days for any of us. Not like you’ve got the monopoly on it.”

More than anything, that startled her. She’d known Haymitch for eight years now. Eight summers, and for every single one, he’d had that air of nonchalance. Early on, it still carried the traces of a languid arrogance, but later, drunk and destroyed as he got, it turned to something like total apathy. People could say whatever they wanted about Haymitch, to his face or on the television, and he’d just accept it. Last summer was something different, but in between the bouts of intense action, when he wasn’t acting on behalf of the two kids, the pathetic acceptance crept in again. It was like he’d gotten so used to taking it, over and over, that he’d forgotten how to do anything else but let other people control the situation when it came to himself. The advice she always got from him was usually helpfully honest about the realities, but basically implying that all she could do was try to endure it. Even his sarcasm tended to be more dismissively condescending than openly barbed, as if he wanted to chase people away rather than fight it out. 

Haymitch simply _put up_ with things because he’d more or less given in on everything. Everybody in Mentor Central knew it. So to have him actively call bullshit on her was a shock. Her eyes went to his, seeing him look directly at her rather than that awkward sidelong glance that she was accustomed to from him.

Unnerved, she instinctively went for the surest weapon she had—silencing him by guilt. It worked on almost any victor; Haymitch was the sole exception in the past, because he was the only one who’d been through what she had. “Yeah, sorry I’m not at my sweetest. But hey, I don’t remember you being chased by mutts and getting an electrical shock?”

“Blame the Capitol for that, darlin’, I ain’t the one that came up with this Quell,” he shot back smartly. “And if you want to turn this into a contest of which victor’s gotten fucked over the most, remember, I started writing the damn _book_ on that while you were still busy shitting your diapers.” He clasped his hands and laid them on the table, leaning forward and lowering his voice. “We don’t have much time here. So can we skip ahead?”

Still caught staring, she nodded slightly, not sure who the hell this Haymitch was, but sensing that he was in no mood to fuck around. It was like someone had poked a seemingly harmless hibernating honey bear enough that it roused and angrily turned on whoever was nearby, proving that with its strength and teeth and claws and speed, it was a menace when provoked from its torpor. She’d stumbled into a honey bear den late one fall when she was a little kid, and looking at the man sitting there, black-haired and seeming somehow _larger_ with the tense air of an angry, barely suppressed energy, she had thoughts of the mound of thick dark fur and the smell of carnivore breath and a pungent musky wildness. All those years ago her heart leaped into her throat as the bear seemed to rouse even as she backed away slowly, quietly, until Bern finally found her. It seemed like over the years that everyone had forgotten that Haymitch was a victor and that he’d fought fiercely to get out of the last Quell. That had been their mistake. Looking at him now, roused and spoiling for a battle, it seemed undeniable.

Looking at him too, she felt a curiously contradictory mix of things. First she felt the welling up of rage, ready as ever. What right did he have to call her out? He didn’t know what—except he did, and he’d neatly headed her off at the pass by pointing it out. He was always the one person she couldn’t make back down by pointing out how lucky they were and how they were in no position to judge. She’d found other buttons to push here and there, but that primary one was gone. But after he’d made it clear he didn’t want to fuck her past a one-time favor, and once she saw how toothless he seemed in his ready submission, he became reliable. She could lean on him for a drinks and complaining session and he’d never threaten her. _Safe_. But he wasn’t now.

For a moment she felt a relief that someone else could match her on her terms, rather than pitying or fearing or just accepting that she was so fucked up that of course she’d be a bitch. Nobody ever stood up to her. Not Blight, with his guilty avoidance. Not Finnick, with how he good-naturedly let others lead like a good Career. Not even Haymitch before, with his offhanded attitude of not giving a shit about much. 

That fleeting understanding fled like melting ice before the spring as a slap of cold fear hit her. He was unpredictable right now, able to keep up with her, and that made him dangerous. Instinctively she turned how to how neutralize the threat, how to control him.

She couldn’t intimidate or threaten him, and even pressing at his guilt didn’t make him flinch this time as it always had. Which put her back at her other weapon—fucking. She eyed him, mind racing as she tried to figure whether or not this new Haymitch might even be interested. He hadn’t been in all the time she’d known him. Not even a flicker of passion when he fucked her that once. 

But now…she found herself looking at him in a way she hadn’t before, sizing him up. Not exactly out of desire; as she noticed those strong hands and the power in their half-clenched fingers, it wasn’t to imagine them on her skin, but how she could keep him distracted and keep those hands away from her. The broad shoulders and chest only made her think of how he was bigger and stronger than her, able to overpower her. 

Even that wasn’t fully honest. There was a new awareness there too that she couldn’t deny. When he wasn’t a pathetic wreck acting like a soused eighty-year-old man, that dangerous shine in his eyes and the air of barely-suppressed energy made him, even tired and scruffy and still a bit heavy as he was, almost attractive. He looked somewhat fuckable now, she thought, amazed by it.

“Sure, _honey bear_ ,” she said sarcastically, “and whatever it is you want from me, what will you do for me?”

The odd mingling of fear and awareness turned within her, making her stomach clench suddenly. _Are you actually getting turned on by the thought of getting one over on him now that he’s halfway fuckable? Sick pervert. It’s one thing to do it to some Capitol asshole, but…and you’re also half dead to boot and look like shit. He’s probably looking at you and he’d laugh if you tried seducing him._ Yeah, that was Haymitch. Trouble was he wouldn’t be stupid enough to fall for it. Closing her eyes, she tried to clear her mind of all of it, though she couldn’t get rid of that unsettled feeling. 

She must have smirked or had some kind of tone that he recognized because she could see the temper gathering there. If she’d been safely distant from it, she might almost have been fascinated for it. As was, she just braced up for it, ready to fight him as need be. “Fucking isn’t an option,” he said, an angry edge to his words, eyes narrowed and lips drawn back slightly from his teeth in a half-snarl. She noticed his twanging Twelve accent grew even thicker with temper. “I already played the whore for you once. I ain’t doing it again.”

“Who said I was asking for a fuck?” she returned snappishly, not quite understanding his tone and the derision in it. He’d agreed to it, hadn’t he? “You think I’m in the mood for that right now, and that I’d go to _you_ for it anyway?” 

That last bit was a cheap shot, but it hit its mark. She saw a sudden warm, ruddy glow against those high cheekbones, and felt a hot satisfaction at it. “So,” she went on, folding her hands and smiling at him, knowing she’d won for the moment and almost agonized at how relieved she felt at it, “what’s our little chitchat about today?”

“Katniss is dead,” she gave him credit for not flinching as he said it, “and Peeta’s going to be a long time recovering.” Physically and psychologically, Johanna was sure. “There needs to be someone that people can look to right now. The face of the rebellion.”

“And from a disgustingly wholesome adorable virgin you’re coming to Panem’s favorite slutty bitch to try to appeal to the people?” She laughed at that, tipping her head back and enduring how much it hurt to laugh just so he could see and hear it, letting the force of her derision hit him and hopefully knock him off balance. “You’re nuts.”

“Desperate, I’d put it,” he answered her bluntly, and she quit laughing at the honesty. “The Quell finally put everyone on edge. We can pull it together and go forward—we can make something happen. Or we can give up and let Snow get away with all of it again and admit that he can take whatever the fuck he wants and we’ll accept it. I’m sick of that.” 

So that was what did it—pushed him over the edge and made him come out throwing punches. “Well,” she said, “why me? Seriously, now.”

“You called Snow out—openly.”

She’d had nothing to lose by it at that point. “Yep.”

“Nobody’s ever done that. You called him out, you said what everyone’s thought but never dared to say in public. He condemned you to die, and you’ve escaped that, and you challenged him too, and you can challenge him again because you’re out of his reach now. You realize how powerful that could be to people?” 

“More than a handful of berries and a cute little romance?” she said sarcastically.

“Probably.” He sat back, arm draped over the arm of his chair and gave her a sly smile, the one that told her that scheming brain of his was hard at work. “So, were you just slinging words around in there, or do you want to burn down his backyard for real?”

“I’ve wanted him dead for a long time, idiot,” she said between her teeth, feeling the swell of burning hatred as ever, hot and caustic.

“You know I have too,” he answered, looking directly at her, head slightly tilted as if in question, asking if she remembered. No, she hadn’t forgotten. Of all the things they said and did on that afternoon when she was seventeen, him admitting he’d wanted Snow dead for years still seemed the more genuine of it.

_The funny thing was, a little over an hour ago she’d been nervously trying to ask him to sleep with her and snapping at him to shut up as he chuckled at her like she was some idiot, steepling his fingers and smirking and saying, “Oh, my my. She throws a mean axe--I’m a real fan of that, by the way--and she’s got a brain in there. A real winner.” Twenty minutes ago they’d been as physically close as two people could be, his bare skin on hers._

_But it was after they were done that he’d been almost...nice. Quietly handed her a few aspirin for any soreness and suggested she ought to go take a shower, and she realized with embarrassment that smell was what sex smelled like, and given that she was supposed to still be a virgin until tomorrow night, he was right, she’d better go clean up before she headed out in public. She’d slipped out from under the covers, padded to the bathroom and hastily scrubbed herself down, cleaning off every trace of what she’d just done. He’d taken a shower after her. By the time he came back out she was fully dressed. She averted her eyes while he got on his own clothes because she might have seen him naked, but this was different. The silence as she sat there on the still-rumpled bed finally got unbearable. “I hate him,” she said in a whisper, and not thinking about it, she instinctively looked towards him._

_Thankfully he was in the middle of doing up his shirt buttons already, brisk efficient movements, and it felt weirdly intimate, watching a man get dressed. “I know.” He didn’t ask what “him” she was referring to here. Obviously he got it._

_“He’s an asshole. A monster.”_

_Haymitch gave a low sigh, a sound that seemed more like resignation than impatience. He sounded about a hundred years old, she thought. Quickly he shrugged on his vest, and turned to face her, now finally giving her his full attention. There was a spark of some kind of sharp intensity there, a glimmer of interest and emotion in his eyes that had been totally absent when he touched her. “Very true. But you don’t say that anywhere but here in this apartment,” he said. “It’s not safe out there where they’ve got people listening and they’ll hear it. Not yet. Maybe not during your lifetime.”_

_She looked back at him, fingers clenching into fists. No way out, he told her, best to just accept it and try to deal with it. “I wish he was dead. I want to kill him myself.” If this was the only place she could say it, she was damn well going to say it._

_“So do I, sweetheart,” he said wearily, and now she could see it in his face, remembering that he’d been a kid once, the cocky boy she’d seen in the tape Snow had showed her, and he’d had a family too. He’d been like her, before Snow got to him. “Believe me, if it was as easy as killing him, I’d have taken a knife to him years ago and fuck the consequences. But the trouble is, if we take Snow out, that doesn’t solve it. It’s the whole rotten system that supports what he does. If we don’t get rid of that, we’ll get another one just like him stepping in to fill the void.” He smiled wryly at her, knowing it wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but in a way, she appreciated he didn’t try to lie to her and treat her like a stupid kid. “Come on, Johanna. I’ll walk you back to the Training Center.” He hesitated, and then added, “If you ever want a drink, you know where the Twelve apartment is.”_

That was all the comfort he’d offered her then, and all he’d ever offered her since: a drink, some honesty, and the chance to bitch about things that couldn’t be changed. But now here he was, looking at her again with that intensity, as if she’d become something more than a fellow fuck-up, and he told her that now things could actually change. She felt like the cage door suddenly stood wide open, inviting her to step through and into freedom. The world outside of it was unfathomably vast, though. 

Of course there was a catch too, when she thought about it. “You want me to put on pretty dresses and roleplay for you? Play the good little actress and say the lines you want?” she said sarcastically. “I’m not a malleable little seventeen-year-old who’s going to buy any load of crap you tell me.” She leaned in, smiling dangerously at him. “What little lies did you tell Katniss Everdeen, mm? It was pretty fucking obvious she didn’t know what the plan was.” So they were hoping to turn her into their gullible little puppet? The fact that Haymitch, of all people, proposed it made it all the worse.

Pushing his buttons, instinctive as it was to her to keep one step ahead, had been a bad move, because his eyes went hard and angry, darkening with temper. His features tightened and he snapped, “No, you’re not seventeen. High time you stop acting like a bratty kid throwing your weight around. You’re almost twenty-six now. You want people to not treat you like a kid? Grow the fuck up and act like a woman.”

The words stung, feeling like she’d been slapped by the one person she could rely upon, the one person who understood exactly why she was so damn warped and twisted, and she lashed out. “Says the forty-one-year-old drunk asshole.”

“I never wanted to be your role model, I wanted to be the worst case scenario you avoided with everything in you, you little idiot,” he returned swiftly, irritably, “and at least it took me two decades to go completely to hell. You’ve totally outdone me in eight years in shoving _everyone_ away, including the other victors.”

“What’s the point of this?” she demanded. “You want me to be your little publicly appealing figurehead but gee, I’m such a bitch. Doesn’t really add up, does it?” 

He shook his head, head in his hand, elbow propped on the table. He peered at her between his fingers. “You little idiot.” He said it without vehemence, which almost made it cut deeper. “This is your chance to take something back from the Capitol. To rewrite the story. Say we magically win this war tomorrow. What’s your life going to be? Who’s going to be a part of it?”

She went silent, trying to imagine it. She’d go back to Seven, back to Victors’ Glade and the house there. The empty, silent house. Finnick, if he was still alive, would go back to Four with Annie. Maybe they’d talk sometimes. “Finnick,” she said defensively, knowing even as she said it that it was a weak shield. “Assuming he’s not dead from you abandoning him.”

“Fuck you, Johanna, don’t you pull that crap on me,” he said, voice dangerously soft. “You’ve worked in Mentor Central, you know all about making the hard choices in hopes of saving _someone_. And I was the one arguing with Plutarch to stay longer.”

“Finnick,” she repeated, more decisively, staring at him and willing him to back down. “He’s my friend. I’d have him.” She refused to think of him as dead. She refused to think of what the Capitol might do to him if he was still alive.

“Your friend. And what’s that really mean? So you and Finnick had a couple years where you did each other some good, and he’s your friend, but he doesn’t really need you now. He’s got plenty of people to look after him that have much better claim than you ever did—every time he may have confided in you, he probably confided ten times more often to Mags, or Carrick, or even old Shad. And just how many things do you think he told Annie Cresta in bed, or in the kitchen while they were making dinner together, and how many good days did they have where they actually forgot the Games? Chaff’s got three kids, almost grown now, and he’s been widowed and remarried—I’ve never even met any of them—and Chantilly’s got Niello and the twins. Sure, the Capitol likes to pretend we’re all one big happy family, and being a victor is something nobody who’s never set foot in an arena can understand, but it only goes so far. The others, either they’ve got other victors from home that know them better and are around the entire year, or they’ve done the best they can to get beyond the arena, married and moved on. Those people are all we’ve got left, you and me, so we’d like to think as we’re important to them as they are to us. But we’re just,” his forefinger and thumb held up to indicate a small margin less than the width of a finger, “one tiny corner of their lives—we’re one little piece of the few weeks a year that they’re forced to endure, want to get over with, and then go home to spend their time with those who _can_ help them forget. That ain’t much foundation for claiming a deep and significant friendship on their parts.”

If he had been anyone else she would have wanted to tear him apart for wielding a sharp truth with such painful precision. But merciless as he was, she couldn’t say he was wrong—because he’d lived that life too, and she’d probably always known deep down that while Finnick might matter to her, too many others held stronger claim on him for it to be equal. “Then maybe it’s all we deserve from them,” she told him calmly as she could, daring him to deny it.

“Maybe it is,” he smiled dryly at her, eyes bright and fierce, “and every family needs its fuckups that they keep around simply because they’re good enough folk to be kind—twenty-odd years of that, so I ought to know. The war ends tomorrow, you and I still have nothing. But this here, this is your chance.”

When he put it that way, she had to admit he had a point. She had nobody who truly was her intimate, nobody that she mattered to on that deepest level. She hadn’t let them in. The fact that he included himself in that made it easier to swallow. 

And yeah, there was something appealing in the notion of reclaiming herself from the Capitol, trying to rewrite the “bitch with the axe” they’d made her into. “I’m listening,” she said, sitting back cautiously.

“It won’t be easy remaking your image, no. But the thing with Snow is that it all depends on us keeping our mouths shut. The moment we start saying honest things—if we expose the lies, that’ll help. We show them Johanna Mason. A woman who’s endured the worst Coriolanus Snow could throw at her, who’s lost like so many of them have lost, and who’s still a survivor—someone strong and proud.”

She couldn’t even recognize herself in those admiring words, and especially not coming from Haymitch’s lips. She laughed in response; sure he was mocking her somehow, especially after he’d just cut her open with his criticisms of telling her to grow up and pointing out she had no friends. Even as she forced herself to laugh, she hated herself for the burn of tears in her eyes. “Fuck you, Haymitch.” She hated the waver in her voice even more, blaming the fact that she was exhausted, in pain, and she’d just left one of the few friends she had behind, but she knew he could hear it, and she knew he’d use her weakness against her.

“You never lost all your pride, Johanna,” he said, voice soft now, and not in that deadly calm way—he sounded almost gentle. “That’s why you never stopped fighting. I did. I gave up. Pride…we can work with that.” He passed her a handkerchief, matter-of-factly, without any remark. “I won’t force you into anything.” Now there was an edge of entreaty, pleading with her to believe him. “I won’t let _them_ force you into anything.”

She looked at him, trying to believe it, but suspicion crept in. “And the first time your little rebellion buddies want me to pull a line of complete bullshit? You gonna let Heavensbee give me orders so you don’t have to kick up a fuss?” She’d tear Plutarch Heavensbee to shreds before she’d ever listen to him. 

“When have I _ever_ sold you out?” he demanded, glowering at her. She could easily remember him quietly taking the worst on himself more than once. With utter clarity she remembered when she was eighteen how he’d baited their hostess at a party, mocking her and Finnick as ignorant kids to draw attention away. The worst she’d endured at that party was some idiot wanting her to spank them. Walking behind Haymitch as they left, she’d seen the dark splotches on the back of his shirt and how stiffly he walked, and smelled the sex and blood on him. But he hadn’t stumbled, hadn’t whimpered, even as the car ride back to the Training Center must have been agony. Remembering him then, looking at his vehemence now, it seemed not all his pride had gone by the wayside either.

“You haven’t,” she answered honestly.

“I can’t promise you much. But you know I won’t sell you out. And we’ll see what we can do. Give you back some of what you’ve lost and…” He hesitated. “Most of all, we’ll damn well make sure all that’s been lost is called in as a reckoning. If we let this rebellion die down now, we make all of that worthless by just accepting it.”

At least he didn’t say they’d make sure people hadn’t died for nothing. Of course they’d died for nothing. “They mattered,” she agreed.

“Good. Here’s a thought—when we get to Thirteen, let me do the talking.” He smirked at her, and that felt more comfortable and familiar than this new Haymitch, by turns angry and solicitous. “I don’t know much about them. But they’ll expect you to be confrontational. It’s your image. Let me deal for you and chances are I’ll get you better terms than you will.” 

_Trust me,_ his words and his eyes said to her. Trusting anyone felt unfathomable. So did this entire crazy idea—her as some kind of inspiration? Chances were it would fall totally flat and she’d feel like a complete ass for entertaining even a spark of hope that something could be different, for her and for everyone else. The clock couldn’t be rewound, after all. She couldn’t be a girl again, innocent and with a family she loved, and hopes of a simple life.

But he had offered her a chance to get some of her own back against Snow, to not be helpless and just have to take whatever he chose to give. To make the pain of her family’s murders, being whored out, going into the arena a second time, and even leaving Finnick behind to die actually count for something. Of all people, he wouldn’t forget what they were fighting for, and why. He offered her the sweetness of potential vengeance.

Most of all, he _asked_ , and made it her choice. He didn’t expect or dictate. When was the last time she got to choose anything, rather than having it inflicted? Slippery as he could be, Haymitch probably would manage to get more out of them than she would. This was the man who’d screwed with Seneca Crane’s head and gotten him to spare two tributes. Besides, she could admit deep in the privacy of her own mind and heart, it would be nice to have someone she could actually _trust_ , rather than just an ally to use and then discard before they could fuck her over first, or a mentor who’d just tell her what to do and expect her to obey. For all that he’d snapped she acted like a child, he treated her like an adult with that offer, as an equal. “All right,” she said. “Fine. You’re my negotiator. But don’t expect me to sit there and totally shut up.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said dryly. “Be confrontational, remember?” He winked. “We work as a team. You’ll be pissed off and demand the world, and then I come in, try to reason with you and with them, I look utterly reasonable, and we manage to twist their arms for everything we can.”

“You sly bastard,” she said, but with some admiration. No wonder Snow had been afraid of the potential he’d had as a kid. 

“All the little tricks you never bothered to learn with the sponsors, darlin’.” He reached over and just for a moment, touched her hand lightly with his fingertips, watching her as he did so to make certain it wasn’t an invasion, and touching towards the wrist, her well away from the burns. She appreciated that affirmation of being human to him as much as anything he’d done—nobody ever touched her except to fuck her. So she took that small point of contact, skin suddenly tingling in a way that had nothing to do with electric shock, as she felt more alive than she had in years from sheer potential. “Sit tight. We’ll be there soon.”


	7. Chapter 7

After a gentle bump let her know they’d landed, Plutarch insisted only he, Johanna, and Haymitch would go to do the initial talks. It was probably a measure of how shocked everyone was still that those who weren’t drugged unconscious didn’t protest. She watched Blight reach over and take Clover’s hand, and Beetee turned to Wiress, the two of them conversing lowly, intently. Chaff clapped Haymitch on the shoulder. “Be careful out there,” he said.

Wiress looked up at them, her dark eyes wide and bottomless as a well, maybe from the sedation drugs they’d given her. “Beware of new friends bearing gifts,” she cautioned.

A shiver went down Johanna’s spine, wondering just where Wiress had heard that one, and if she knew what _Careful of strangers bearing a gift_ meant in Seven. It was a play on words. In one of the old languages spoken in Seven centuries before, “ _Gift_ ” meant “poison”. It taught Seven kids to be careful: something that seemed sweet could mask danger. 

Carefully Johanna descended the ramp, and immediately felt a crawling unease go down her spine. They’d landed in a steel box, with grey metal walls, no windows, and no sign of anything so normal as trees or the sky. The air smelled stale and dry, slightly chemical. “Where are we?” she asked suspiciously.

“District Thirteen, Johanna,” the click of Capitol shoes and Plutarch Heavensbee’s resonant voice came from behind her, and was it her imagination or had his silly chirping Capitol accent suddenly taken on more of the nasal tones of the Thirteen crew? “Remember, the surface was bombed to rubble in the Dark Days. Everything is safely hidden underground now.” She gritted her teeth, trying to not leap at him standing behind her, unseen. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction, unless it was to turn and claw his eyes out for using her first name so casually when he’d been trying his damn best to kill her,

A heavier tread sounded against the metal ramp next, and then she heard another voice. “Nice job by them of hiding down here for seventy-five years,” Haymitch said, standing alongside her instead of behind her, his tone absolutely and artificially neutral. She didn’t risk looking over to see his face, but she could guess. That carefully blank tone was the one they used when they desperately wanted to be sarcastic but couldn’t risk it, so they left it ambiguous and hoped it would be taken as a compliment. 

“Well,” she said, “let’s do this shit.” More grey-uniformed people who looked starved for sunlight came to escort them. Even the darker-skinned ones had a blue or ashen tone to them rather than the rich warmth of Seven’s gold or the deepest Eleven bistre or Five’s henna or Six’s copper. The titles flew—Major, Colonel, Soldier, Sergeant. She couldn’t take any of them in, as they followed the Thirteen people through a warren of tunnels and elevators, deeper into the heart of the earth—deeper away from escape, her instincts warned her. A Seven child wasn’t ever meant to be in a place like this. 

She glanced over at Haymitch, wondering how he felt about this. He was from the mining district, wasn’t he? Going underground out to be natural for him, and yet he looked around with the furtive air of someone profoundly uncomfortable, his eyes never quite settling on anything. She didn’t look behind her at the others, not wanting these new allies to see her looking unsettled. Experience taught her the value of looking collected and in charge, even as her exhausted, pain-wracked body wanted nothing more than to drop into a bed and sleep, and pray that nightmares didn’t find her.

Finally, Haymitch ventured quietly, “Are we almost there? We have wounded people needing care, you know. They were stabilized, but…”

“Your wounded will be tended to upon President Coin’s orders,” Major Something interrupted crisply, a rail-thin man with smooth, toffee-toned skin marred only by a long, old scar trailing from his hairline halfway down his cheek. Or was it Sergeant Something? She couldn’t say either way with certainty. 

She noticed that in their identical dark grey trousers and tightly tucked-in pale grey shirt, all of them looked thin. Not emaciated; she was more than familiar with the hollow, slowly crumbling-inward look of hunger. But they had the lean, cat-like look that was all skin, bone, and muscle, one that spoke of balancing just on the razor’s edge between absolutely no spare body fat and actual starvation. It was that look the Capitolites strove so hard to achieve. There wasn’t even a shred of softness to any of these people. The Two victors were all a bunch of total fitness freaks, but they looked positively cuddlesome and even chubby next to this lot. The women’s angular, nearly breastless bodies, the men looking hard as cast metal, the tight, hawkish facial features on both sexes—they seemed freakish to her, barely human. 

She thought of Chantilly and Clover, middle-aged women with soft hips and ample breasts, and Blight, with his slightly pooched-out belly. She’d figured the funny looks on the hovercraft were just the curiosity of tactless gawkers checking out some victors up close and personal. She was well used to that from the Capitol. With a clearer mind and more perspective, it seemed otherwise. She noticed the openly disdainful looks they cast Haymitch, who’d lost weight before the Quell but still visibly carried a bit extra, and Plutarch with his clearly displayed paunch beneath the rich turquoise brocade vest and coat. 

She got a few stares too, given that she wasn’t sapling-slim either. In the summer in Seven, rations were never enough for the hard work every day at the lumber camps, and without the ability to forage a bit out in the forest and have the Peacekeepers overlook what went into the communal stew pots, they all would starve by fall. But those same rations in winter were more than ample enough, given the far more sedentary work in the carpentry shops and mills. Apparently the Capitol was too dumb to figure that out, or too lazy to institute seasonal rations. She’d believe it could be either, or both. The cold bit a little less sharply for a tiny bit of fat they all gained in the cold months. Granted, Seven people usually gained five pounds at most, and Johanna tended more towards fifteen or twenty these days since she could buy richer food and didn’t work it off as quickly given she’d been kicked out of the lumber camps since her Games. 

Yeah, well, it wasn’t like the fucking Quell announcement had helped her stress, so she hadn’t lost it before the Games like she usually did once she got outside more in the spring. She’d gotten some comments from potential sponsors too that she was looking “a little chunky” with that lingering weight on top of the ten pounds that stayed on because she enjoyed not being skinny according to their demands. _We all know that you gained a little weight in the years after your Games, and you carried it so well that nobody minded that much, but now—well, you’re looking a little too chunky, Johanna dear, and if not for the Quell you might want to consider surgical reduction._ After the satisfaction of making herself into something they didn’t want, the anger swiftly followed. _So I eat a little too much sometimes, fuck you all if I want some cake when it’s the only comforting thing I can get_ , she thought towards the Capitol and these Thirteen assholes both. “You wanna fuck me that you just can’t stop staring, handsome?” she said sarcastically to the nearest man, a blue-eyed and fawn-skinned man whose dark blond hair was thinning already, though she thought he was barely past thirty. She was familiar with what lust looked like, and it was clearly a look of judgment and criticism, but she enjoyed his panicked and embarrassed look at being called out like that and put on the defensive.

“Obesity is disgusting; it’s a selfish waste of resources,” he said defensively, avoiding her eyes as if she might taint him somehow.

“Oh, aren’t _you_ just a cute little public service announcement,” she said sweetly, making sure to shake her ass just a little more as she sauntered by him. Inside, though, she was seething, about ready to turn around and tell Haymitch to fuck himself, and tell Plutarch she’d kill him later for what he’d done, and to hell with this entire rebellion. But like Haymitch pointed out, where would she go? She wasn’t stupid enough to believe Snow would let her live after she’d yelled her defiance so openly. And she’d persisted in living this long just to spite that asshole. She wasn’t going to just walk right into his trap.

Finally, with one last door labeled “COMMAND”, they entered yet another steel box harshly lit with fluorescent lights. Several people were seated already at a long conference table, painted the same dull matte grey as the walls. The chairs, she noticed, deciding by this point to be amused by it, were the same grey, and of course unpadded, and the backs were hard and rigid and straight as a true-cut piece of lumber. The harsh fluorescent lights gave an unearthly bluish cast to them, particularly to the fair-skinned ones, including the woman sitting at the head of the table. A row of gold stars pinned to the points of her shirt collar seemed to be the only color about her. Along with the snow-white skin, she had iron-grey hair falling to her shoulders, straight as the chair backs. Her eyes were grey; not the light silvery grey of Haymitch’s, not even the darker storm grey that Katniss Everdeen had possessed. These looked like the last miserable clumps of melting March snow, more of a dirty white than anything.

“Ma’am,” one of the Thirteen minions said. “May I present…”

“I know who they are, Lieutenant,” she said, staring at each of them in turn. “I also see quite a large problem in who _isn’t_ here.”

“We have a contingency plan in place for this, Madame President,” Plutarch spoke up. So this was Thirteen’s president. It seemed pretentious, calling herself president of a single district. Besides, Thirteen was in hiding, but it still technically belonged to Panem, didn’t it? Still, there was a rebellious _fuck you_ flair to declaring herself perfectly equal to Snow, rather than being a subordinate mayor like Elmar Luoma, that Johanna couldn’t quite help but admire.

“The boy?” Coin said. “Where is he?”

“Aboard the hovercraft still, being stabilized for movement down to the med-bay,” the minion who’d lectured about fatness answered. “Along with the others—Chaff McCormick, Cashmere Donov—“

Coin held up one slim-fingered hand to halt the recitation. Obviously she either knew which victors had been recovered, or didn’t care, or both. “Have them seen to, Lieutenant,” she said curtly. “I assume that would have been your first request, Abernathy, from how you’re standing there fidgeting?”

“Helps negotiations if I know I ain’t worrying about our people dying,” Haymitch answered, again keeping that stiffly neutral tone.

“Sit.” It was a crisp command, not an invitation. She looked annoyed when none of them was exactly brisk about it. “Will the boy be fit for the role?”

“No,” Plutarch said without hesitation. “He’s badly injured. Full recovery will probably take him several weeks. I doubt we can spare that long, especially with the Mockingjay dead. We need an immediate replacement so we don’t lose momentum.”

“I presume this is why you dragged Mason along,” Coin said, eyes flicking over to Johanna again, looking skeptical. “This is your second option? I hardly see how a woman who’s best known these days for abusive language, and getting drunk at clubs and going home with Capitol strangers—and sometimes not even making it to their home—will actually be able to spur a rebellion.” 

It took everything she had to not want to rip the woman’s eyes out from that dismissive tone. _Slut. Bitch._ She’d heard it all before. But she glanced over at Haymitch and saw the sidelong warning look he gave her, warning her to be silent. _Not the time,_ it said. If she went off on this arrogant bitch as she deserved, that would probably screw the whole thing right there. Fuming, she sat there. If Haymitch botched this, she swore grimly to herself that she’d kick his ass. 

"I don’t like this, Abernathy," she told Haymitch, narrowing in suspicion to gimlet sharpness. 

Haymitch smiled the sort of cocky, flippant smile at her that she’d seen him use years ago on camera, the sort that suggested the world would be so much better if it would only take his advice. “Well, you know I’m ever eager to please, ma’am.” 

"We thought you might have been right for it, you know, all those years ago," she said, striving too hard for casualness in her tone but Johanna could see she was watching closely to see if the mark was hit, like she was eager to see the sight of blood. "The appealing and clever boy who survived the terrible odds of the Second Quarter Quell by his wits and defied the Capitol—what a Mockingjay you would have made, I should think. Unfortunately, Snow ruined you so quickly, before we could approach you." 

Haymitch stayed silent at that, too much iron control developed from years on camera to react visibly with shock or anger. But Johanna saw his fingers twitching, like he either wanted the neck of a liquor bottle or Alma Coin’s neck between them, and she wasn’t sure which. Still, the casual, dismissive cruelty pissed her off. _Ruined_ , she said, like he was a plate or a book or a shirt. Not a human being, a sixteen-year-old kid who’d been through hell and had his family murdered and his body sold for having the poor taste to be smart enough to find a way to survive. Once he was _useless_ to them, apparently District Thirteen just let him suffer it all. She was almost certain he wouldn’t defend himself. Stupid bastard never would. He just endured it all, folding up in on himself like some big, mopey turtle until it was over. 

She was about to speak up for him when Haymitch surprised her by speaking first. “I think,” he said carefully, “we can agree that I’m not what’s needed right now. I’m not the kid I was then, and they edited my tape to cut my little marvelous moment with the forcefield. Only victors ever see the unedited tape now.” He managed to say that without a shred of sarcasm or irony, and she marveled at that. “And I may have come into the Quell far more popular than last year, but right now all they’ll see with me is that I let a boy go into the arena instead of me, and Katniss died under my watch as mentor.”

Skewed reality, of course—once Peeta volunteered, Haymitch couldn’t have dissuaded him. And a mentor was so powerless. But he was right. They’d see only failures again from him, and a man desperately trying to distract them from it. “He’s right,” Plutarch acknowledged. “We need someone who wasn’t closely linked to Katniss, but someone who can inspire people.” 

“And you’ve got her. You were watching the Games feed,” Haymitch said to Coin. “I assume you saw her calling out Snow. We can work with that. We can work with peoples’ anger at injustice. You need someone who’s willing to openly defy him, and she provides that. The time for subtle appeal is done.”

"The trouble is, Johanna," Plutarch said, "honestly, while you definitely appealed to the people by defying Snow, you also scare them." She didn’t know exactly what game Plutarch was playing here, but from the glance he gave Haymitch, obviously he was playing on their side for now. She’d roll with that, but she wouldn’t trust him as far as she could throw him after that.

She shrugged nonchalantly and said, “Gee, you mean they’re actually scared of the idea of a lying violent little bitch with an axe?” This was far more ridiculous than sitting through prep for interviews twice. Interviews to be a national savior, take one.

"Well, Madam President, this isn’t what we expected," Plutarch said, eyeing Johanna with interest again like she was some kind of new mutt exhibited in the Pennysound Zoo, "but actually, consider that Johanna taking on the role could be a real plus. Snow expected the rebellion to come from Katniss Everdeen, he didn’t expect this at all. Move and countermove—Snow thinks he’s won, so we can surprise him. Johanna, you can still be the Mockingjay." He announced it with triumph, watching her reaction like he’d just handed her every New Year’s present she’d ever wished for as a little girl.

Johanna gave a tight, harsh laugh at how he looked like he expected her to be like a grateful little puppy wagging her tail. Fuck that. Fuck him. “Oh, I won’t be the Mockingjay, Heavensbee.” Screw Haymitch too if he tried to rein her in.

His expression of surprise made it damn obvious he’d never expected this, given that she’d agreed to do it. “But…”

"Oh, I think she wants to help lead a rebellion, Plutarch," Haymitch said with a smirk, raising an eyebrow at her, "she just doesn’t want to do it your way." So he was really on board with this, and apparently enjoying it. Good.

"You know what a mockingjay is?" Johanna said, smiling sweetly at Plutarch. "It’s a harmless little twit that can only sing the tunes it’s given. So no, I won’t be your fucking Mockingjay. Yours, Thirteen’s, or anyone else’s.” If she could be more than “the bitch with the axe” for once, become a symbol to inspire the nation to finally rise up and say they’d had enough, so much the better, but she wasn’t going to swap Snow’s control for anyone else’s…never again.

As she stared Plutarch down, hearing Haymitch’s acerbic, admiring laugh and then him saying, “No question, you’ve got the wrong symbol there, Plutarch,” she smiled in victory. 

“Perhaps,” Plutarch said hesitantly, and Johanna knew she’d won, “the Mockingjay image was particular to Katniss Everdeen. But I think we need _some_ kind of continuity?”

"Hm,” Haymitch drawled the word out thoughtfully, rubbing his chin, “consider this, if we don’t have the use of the Mockingjay, there’s also the notion of the ‘Girl on Fire’," Johanna could almost see Coin gritting her teeth, presumably at the scritching sound of his fingertips hitting stubble. He nodded to Johanna and said, "Don’t forget, it ain’t just coal—wood burns too, and it burns hot.” 

Johanna laughed, liking that—if they thought Katniss Everdeen could burn, they didn’t understand the depth of her own determination and rage here. Maybe she didn’t have a pretty love story to give them, but she had anger, and she knew everyone out there could relate to that. 

“And she’s a woman, not a girl. The adults will likely relate better to her," Plutarch chimed in eagerly. “Katniss appealed to them in her innocence, I grant, with how she refused to let the Capitol sully the things she loved.”

“Wartime is no time for naïve foolishness,” Coin said dismissively, having silently sat back to let them talk for a while. It gave her an air of deliberately lying in wait that crawled down Johanna’s spine uneasily. “I doubt they’d believe it of Mason anyway.”

“No, they wouldn’t. And here’s news for you, Plutarch,” she said, unable to keep the snarl out of her tone. “We really didn’t give a crap about Katniss Everdeen in Seven. What did we care about a girl from Twelve that the Capitol decided to worship, her equally Twelve boyfriend, and their wedding plans? She didn’t change a fucking thing for us, didn’t do a damn thing to help anyone in Seven—it was two more dead tributes, people dying out in the woods at the lumber camps, kids going hungry. Business as usual.”

She barreled on, feeling like she couldn’t stop now that she’d gotten started. It felt too good to let it out. “Snow shits on everything for everyone. You want someone people can actually relate to? You don’t show them the exception, the one who crossed Snow and somehow managed to get away with everything just because the Capitol decided she was _so precious_ and _so special_. You show them someone who’s tasted what it’s like being powerless, someone who’s pissed, someone who’s _just like them_.”

“I think,” Haymitch said quietly, looking at her with an expression caught between anger and anguish, “we can agree that Katniss didn’t exactly ‘get away with it’ in the end. She was just as powerless as the rest of us.”

“She ended up getting more of us killed because Snow wanted her dead and the only one she really gave a shit about potentially dying was her little boyfriend,” Johanna fired back at him. “Don’t blame me if I’m not quite sobbing for her.” She saw from the way Haymitch’s eyes went slightly cold with that familiar distance that he’d stepped back from her. She wanted to regret it, given the honesty they’d had on the hovercraft, but damn it all, she was right. She was tired of everyone acting like the sun had somehow shone out Katniss’ ass.

The silence drew on like the cold, agonizing kiss of a slowly drawn knife-cut. Plutarch fiddled with a pen. Haymitch fidgeted, sweating slightly, though it wasn’t warm in the room. Coin sat stock-still, like a carved marble statue. “Heavensbee?” Coin finally said, voice deadly calm. “You led me to believe me that almost all the districts were firmly united behind the image of the Mockingjay. Did you mislead me?” 

Plutarch hesitated. “Well, most of the districts indicated that they were favorably disposed to…”

“I want an accurate report of the situation. Right now.” When Plutarch hesitated again, Coin’s voice took on a steely edge. “Don’t think that just because you’ve lived in the Capitol so long and enjoyed an absurd and undue amount of privilege there that you’re not subject to authority again. Your mission was always on behalf of District Thirteen. And at this moment, I expect the information you obtained.”

Haymitch shot Johanna a questioning look that she couldn’t quite decipher. Plutarch sighed, rubbing his temples with his fingertips, obviously sensing he’d run up against a superior force, and bowing to it. “Districts Eight, Eleven, and Twelve are firm supporters. Unfortunately, all three are firmly occupied by Peacekeeper forces.” She looked over at Haymitch, noting that he volunteered nothing about Twelve. He sat there with a carefully bland poker face. Given what he’d told them before the Quell about what a living hell Twelve had turned into in the six months prior, he might have been keeping some thoughts to himself about his home district. And if he was keeping his mouth shut, maybe District Twelve didn’t adore Katniss as much as Plutarch thought. 

“So you’ve given me a bunch of rather useless weavers and miners. Eleven’s produce is essential, as we have to control the food supply, though we’ll have an uphill battle to take that. Very well. Continue.” 

“Three, Four, Six, and Nine are at least favorably disposed.”

“Four? Interesting. I would have considered them less likely to risk their privileged status.”

“They got cracked down on last winter, according to Finnick,” Haymitch explained. “Didn’t meet their quotas, apparently. So their privileges got taken away. People are pissed. Same in One, actually. People in the Capitol stopped buying luxury goods with all the other shortages, so people went hungry.”

“I also imagine that given their own most prominent victor is seen as something of an indolent playboy, Four reacted well to a genuinely heartfelt romance—“

“Plutarch,” Haymitch said warningly. “Don’t take cheap shots at a man you left behind to die.” She’d been on the verge of defending Finnick herself, but he’d beaten her to it.

Coin ignored that, bulling right back into the strategy discussion. Johanna wasn’t surprised at all. “Technology, fish, transportation, and grain. Better prospects. Perhaps more easily won than the fortified districts as well.”

“One, Five, Seven and Ten are fairly neutral. They’re certainly angry enough to rebel, but I’m not certain that Katniss was the right inspiration to reach them.”

“You don’t say,” Johanna remarked dryly. 

“Two?” Coin questioned. “They’re the most loyal.”

“Yeah, they really weren’t fans of Katniss,” Haymitch chimed in with a wry tone.

“A mixed bag as always,” Plutarch said, obviously hurrying to gloss that over. “Any attempt to take Two will mean civil war in the district.”

Coin nodded, and it was a slight, economic movement. Johanna noticed that no energy seemed wasted with her—no fidgeting, no clasping her hands, no scratching her nose. The woman was a model of inhuman poise and efficiency. “Very well. That will be taken into account should we choose to proceed.”  
Haymitch raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t ask the obvious question: _And if we don’t?_ Coin eyed Johanna next. “Before we commit our resources to a war with you as its spear point, Mason, I want proof that you can be all your handlers,” she nodded to Plutarch and Haymitch, “claim.”

Oh, hell no. “They’re not m—“ She saw Haymitch making a furious _shut it_ gesture and complied, because no, it wasn’t the right time to start a fight over it, but she gave him a scowl for his troubles. Yeah, they were definitely addressing that one later. No way in hell would Plutarch ever have any authority over her. As for Haymitch, he wasn’t her boss. She might take advice from him—as she just had—but not orders. “Fine. What do you want?”

“A broadcast message from you, inciting the rebellion anew. We’ll send it to the districts and see who responds to your call to arms.” Coin stared directly at her. “Show me you can lead them and you’ll have Thirteen’s support in the war. If they’ve got no inclination to fight for themselves, I’m not risking my resources and soldiers.”

If not, presumably the woman would dump them on the surface, try to cover up Thirteen’s involvement, and let the Capitol rip the districts a new asshole. “Great. Get me a camera whenever you want,” she said.

“We need to plan,” Plutarch protested. “Her image, her words…”

Coin ignored them, her eyes firmly on Johanna. “How hard will you fight for the chance to go to war, Johanna Mason, Not-the-Mockingjay?” she asked, voice soft but deadly.

”Give me the chance and let’s find out,” she challenged the other woman right back.

“Done. You’ll go on camera in six hours. Heavensbee, your camera crew will have arrived by then.”

“We’ll need two of those hours for prep,” Plutarch said promptly. “Quick heal and cosmetics for cleaning up her bruises and injuries—“

“Leave them,” Haymitch said, shaking his head. “You’re thinking too Capitol, Plutarch. If she looks too perfect, they won’t believe it. Let them all see the marks of it on her.” He tipped his head towards Johanna. 

Plutarch sighed, nodding in acknowledgment of that. “Some kind of clothing…”

“You mean I’m not going to just do this in my cute little patient gown?” Johanna said, plucking at the thin grey fabric.

“Do we go for a costume?” Plutarch said, frowning thoughtfully. “No, you’re right, Haymitch, it smacks too much of pageantry. Cinna’s uniform for Katniss was perfect…functional yet stylish, symbolic,”

“Made for a girl fifty pounds lighter than me,” Johanna mocked. “Let’s not make me look ridiculous by squeezing me into it.”

“If you’re not the Mockingjay, what are you?” Plutarch said, looking at her with that distant expression that told her he didn’t really see her. “Wood, fire, yes, those suit you, and the continuity with Katniss is maintained. But…we need a new symbol for your narrative. To make you become something _bigger_ than Johanna Mason, bigger than a victor, bigger than one district.”

“I leave the packaging to you,” Coin said dryly. “I’m far more concerned with the actual content.”

Haymitch pressed his steepled fingers to his lips, and she could see the slight smile breaking across his face. “Phoenix,” he murmured, half to himself. Then he looked at the rest of them and repeated it, louder. “The phoenix. The firebird. Rising from the ashes. So it’s something that can never be destroyed. The Mockingjay died and the rebellion rises up again with The Phoenix, burning even stronger.”

“Continuity of the bird imagery as well? I like it,” Plutarch said, eyes alight with that kind of mad glee that made Johanna imagine parading around in ridiculous red and gold feathers, and she wanted to reach over and grab Haymitch by the lapels and shake him for suggesting it. But it rolled around in her mind. _Phoenix. A fire creature. Indestructible. Kill me and I just come back at you again from my own ashes._ She actually liked it, though she wouldn’t admit that openly. Still, the idea of it made her feel stronger, capable of things Johanna Mason, broken and angry, could never do. This whole notion made her suffering into her strength. 

“Uniform,” Haymitch reminded him. “Discreet. Functional. They don’t want her parading in front of them in a costume.”

“Maybe just a few traces of red and gold, yes,” Plutarch agreed hastily. “I wish we’d gotten Cinna out alive…”

“You’re not going to have that for this first test,” Coin reminded them, “only the clothing on hand, so I suggest you focus on getting through today first.” She picked up the pad of paper and pen at her seat. “You have six hours to prepare.”

“What shooting location?” Haymitch asked.

“I’d suggest the ruins on the surface,” Plutarch said without hesitation. “It’s an open reminder of Capitol destruction, and what we all have to look forward to if this rebellion doesn’t happen.” All right, so he might have been an asshole, but Johanna had to admit he had a few good ideas. 

“The location is harder to secure,” Coin said. “And I have security concerns about flaunting your location so openly.”

“We present it as having flown her to Thirteen’s ruins solely for the propo,” Plutarch said coolly, “as a visceral image.”

“That’s maybe gonna come across as contrived when we’re looking for genuine?” Haymitch argued. “I’d save the ruins for next round.”

Coin weighed that and finally nodded. “I agree with Abernathy. Filming commences at 1600 in the studio.” She gave Johanna one last chilly glance as she headed to the door, and Johanna saw herself through that gaze, where she was still nothing but a fat, angry, vicious slut. “Best to show me what you can do, _Phoenix_.”

“Oh, I will,” she said as the door slammed shut behind Coin with a _whoosh_ of stale air, and added the words, “you icy bitch,” to herself. What the hell was she getting herself into?


	8. Chapter 8

He imagined that Johanna’s first move after the doors shut behind Coin would be to sharply demand that Plutarch get his ass out of the room as well. But though her eyes narrowed to catlike slits for a moment as she stared at the Head Gamemaker-slash-Thirteen-spy, she held her tongue. “Why don’t you get us some coffee before we figure out my script, Plutie?” she said in that acid-sweet tone of voice.

“No coffee here, I’m afraid,” Plutarch said with a sigh. “More’s the pity.” Haymitch firmly agreed with him on that one. He could feel the jitters and shakes creeping up on him. It had been nearly a day now since he’d had any kind of alcohol, and the adrenaline kick wore off somewhere over Panem airspace. The withdrawal wasn’t the agonizing stabs it had been in the winter, but then, he hadn’t been drinking nearly as much. He still had the faint sensation of ants starting to crawl beneath his skin, and it made him want to start scratching like crazy.

“Then be a good little mentor aide and go get us some water. I’ve been dehydrated for days and puking all over the hovercraft because of electric shock didn’t help. Haymitch looks like shit too.” She didn’t say _You owe me_ to Plutarch, but her words and the aggressive upward thrust of her chin spoke it loud and clear.

Plutarch saw it, sighed, and pushed back his chair. “All right. I’ll be back.” So it wasn’t entirely her biting her tongue and playing along, but she’d been more subtle about it than her norm. Plus some time without the man sitting there listening to their every word might well be helpful.

“Nobody likes a diva,” he still reminded her when the door closed behind Plutarch.

“I don’t like _him_ , that’s all.”

“You don’t like anybody,” he returned smartly, kicking back in his chair and putting his feet on the table now that Coin wasn’t there to see it, trying to get even a little bit more comfortable when his entire body felt like a wire drawn too taut and still with the ends being pulled further.

“Said one jackpine to another,” Johanna said with a derisive snort, mimicking his posture, though he saw how she winced as she did it, her sore body obviously protesting the motion. He didn’t quite get the details of the Seven idiom, but he got the gist well enough. “I suppose this is where you tell me Perfect Katniss would have forgotten that Plutarch tried to kill her and done exactly what he told her?”

He couldn’t help but laugh at how mistaken she was, though it still sent a spike of pain through him to think of the girl, lying there in her compartment at the tribute morgue. What would happen to her body now? Would it just rot there? Would Snow, or the mob, desecrate it? He tried to tell himself it didn’t matter, because shit, he’d seen any number of deadly, torturous, or sexual indignities visited on the human body in his years to know that there was nothing sacred in what amounted to a slab of meat, bone, and hair. But still, that face with its death-slackened lines, those closed eyes with their bruise-like smudges of fatigue, and the flawlessness of that olive Seam skin, still so young and firm and smooth then polished to Capitol perfection besides, stuck with him. Like a cut-string wax puppet lying there, robbed of anything human with all the spark of life and animation gone.

He’d left her hair loose after he got the twigs and debris out of it, spread out over her shoulders in a cloud of crackling black silk. But maybe he should have rebraided it, because that was Katniss as he’d almost always known her. He wasn’t sure his hands or his soul were steady enough for it at that point, though.

She noticed his hesitation. “Sorry,” she told him, the word coming out hesitant and uncertain enough to broadcast that she rarely said it, rarely _felt_ she ought to say it, and thus he treasured the worth of it all the more. “I think she was a sullen, judgmental, thick-skulled, and kind of self-centered brat, I’ll be honest.”

“Oh, she was, often enough,” he acknowledged, “but she had her good points,” wanting to keep the vulnerability of admitting it private, but she had to hear it. Johanna had just never gotten to see those. Besides, she hadn’t been a part of things between himself, Peeta, and Katniss. For well or ill, Katniss had been Twelve, and much as he got irritated by her most days, he was— _had been_ —her mentor, and that was a bond that stuck. 

“I’ll never think the sun shone out of her ass. And if I hear people wailing for her, I’m going to roll my eyes. But…” Johanna hesitated. Her eyes didn’t quite meet his now. “I know she was yours. So for you, I’ll try to keep the smartass remarks down.” Given how smartly she’d ripped Katniss to shreds in front of Coin as coddled and unappreciative, and how that must have been her true opinion, he knew that discretion wasn’t lightly offered. He also couldn’t say she was wrong, and clearly she’d hit the right button with Coin by saying it. But Katniss had been far more than her annoying qualities, and a work in progress for all that for her youth, so he appreciated the gesture all the same. It was more sensitivity than he’d have ever expected from her. Wood burned, all right, and Johanna had always been a raging forest fire, willing and able to go at something hotly and mercilessly just to make her point.

His right hand slipped in his jacket pocket, fingers tracing over the arcs and lines of the mockingjay pin, his own personal talisman now. No question that the Mockingjay image was all wrong for Johanna anyway, but he was glad she wouldn’t wear that pin. He’d watched two girls die wearing it and taken it back from their corpses. He didn’t want there to be a third. Mockingjays had been half-Capitol to begin, and the Capitol managed to destroy them. Maybe that phoenix, creature of legend that it was with no Capitol pedigree, could withstand what the mockingjay couldn’t. They needed someone now who could burn passionately, not sing. “Thanks,” he told her, and now her gaze did meet his.

“Don’t mention it.” She waved a hand dismissively. “No, seriously, don’t.” She smirked. “I’ve got my bitch reputation to keep up.”

“No, you don’t, _Phoenix_ ,” he reminded her.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said with a sigh, kicking her feet off the table, leaning her elbows on it instead and tipping her head forward into her palms. “So how do we make me all cuddly, genius?”

“Not cuddly,” he told her. “We keep you angry. People can relate to that, remember? But now we focus that anger, rather than you just going off like a bundle of dynamite on everything around you.”

“Fuck you too, Haymitch,” she said dryly. But at least she was listening. In the past she’d have just snorted in amusement, made some pithy remark about how she didn’t need advice from a half-dead old drunk, and typically done whatever the hell she pleased. So maybe she and Katniss had something in common—impulsive, hot-tempered, rash. _Fire._ “You wanna script me or what?”

“You want a script?” he asked her in return.

“Is it going to be full of fake high-flown dramatic bullshit?” She shook her head, still massaging her face with her fingertips. “You nailed it when you said using the ruins would look too calculated. This needs to be genuine.”

“So what’s genuine?”

She looked out from between her fingers and raised her head. “Oh, my anger’s real,” she said, steel in her voice and the fire of conviction flaring in her eyes. “How much I want to see Snow torn down for what he’s done.”

“Snow or the Capitol?” he asked.

“Same thing. All those fuckers played a role in it. You know that. Betting on the Games. Laughing or looking bored as innocent kids died. Raping victors.” He could hear the rage creeping back into her tone at that.

“I know. But they’re not the same. One’s a single man. The other’s an entire entity.” He rolled his shoulders in a slight shrug. “And Snow’s also done things that plenty of Capitolites don’t know about. Easier to convince the entire nation to want to destroy one man first, wouldn’t you say?”

She mulled that over, fingers brushing through her lank, greasy hair from days without a shower, and he saw the dark jagged bursts of the lightning burns crossing the backs of her hands. “It’s worth a shot,” she acknowledged. “After all, Cori’s been keeping plenty of dirty little secrets even from his own kind, hasn’t he?” 

“Y’know, I don’t think he has a _kind_. Unless they’re actually creating humanoid snake mutts in Three’s labs these days.” He thought about it for a moment, shuddering at the image. “Wouldn’t put it past the Gamemakers, actually.”

Her shoulders hunched forward, reminding him again just how tired she was—how tired he was too. “So I watch it and just call out Snow.”

“Even the Capitol didn’t want the Quell.”

“Only because us _precious victors_ were in it,” she spat. “Two dozen kids as usual? They’d have been overjoyed at a _very special Games_ , or have you drunk so much you forgot that?”

“I actually lived through it,” he said, gritting his teeth against the sudden flare of rage—dammit, he felt like trying to grab the reins on a runaway mule cart at the mines—“up close and personal.” He’d never forget the pageantry, the spectacle, how they’d wildly celebrated the death of forty-seven children as a momentous occasion. How they’d loved him, the sole survivor of the toughest Games they’d ever held. “I know, all right? I know. They only gave a shit because we’re their pets, not because they actually hate the Games. They’d have cried this year and then next year it would be business as usual.” He shook his head, exasperated. “Long term, Johanna. Think about it. They’re sullen with Snow right now because he made this happen and deprived them of something they love. We expose some more ugly truths, make them turn on their master…”

“And we take him down, so what?” she interrupted. “You’re the one who tried to tell me eight years ago that killing Snow just means someone else steps right into his place. What’s changed?”

Surprised she remembered it, he couldn’t help but wonder just what else about that afternoon was etched deeply in her memory, and whether it stung as harshly as it did in his. “We have the chance now to get them questioning Snow rather than us just becoming the assassins.”

“And what do we do then, fearless leader?” she asked in a too-calm voice. “We just let the Capitol slide for everything because they suddenly agreed hey, yeah, you know what? Coriolanus Snow is a _very bad man_.”

“Do you really think they’ll just hand over Snow on a silver platter?” he asked in return. “We’ll end up fighting the Capitol. No question there. They won’t just give in because we say ‘please’. Too much to lose. But what we do in these first few weeks determines whether we fight a united Capitol that firmly believes in Snow, or a divided one.”

Johanna shook her head, lips pursed tightly in annoyance. “Trouble is, genius, we pander to the Capitol by not calling them out, we lose the districts, don’t we?”

He couldn’t help a moment of amused pride. So she was starting to think beyond the moment. He’d known she was clever enough to be capable of it, if only she got beyond the impulse of that hot temper and how it consumed her. “We’ve been in the Capitol too long. Think back to when you were a kid watching the Games.”

“Oh, those were some happy days,” she said with a wry twist of her lips. Dehydrated as she was, he saw they had cracked, and now a bead of blood appeared on her lower lip. She licked at it. “Summer nights sitting around the fire at the lumber camp. June, August, we’d be chasing fireflies. But July, we’d be watching kids kill each other on a portable screen and hoping that next July 4th we’d come back from that trip down to the winter town for the reaping.”

He couldn’t help the relief that she’d been too young to remember his Games, that while she must have sat there with her parents, she hadn’t been aware enough to watch his life fall apart in real time. The thought of her then, not even quite a year old, a baby watching the world around her with curious dark eyes, innocent of all the shit that she’d grow into in due time, was a striking contrast to the girl he’d met, and the woman before him now. He couldn’t help but search her eyes, hard and angry and determined, looking for even a flicker of the child she’d been. Shaking that off, he turned back to the matter at hand. “You didn’t know the difference then. Neither did I, for that matter.” Memories came easily still of being young and afraid, watching the nightly highlights of the Games on the television down in the kitchen. Seam families couldn’t afford much, but they always had the damn television, courtesy of the government. “For them, Snow _is_ the Capitol. Even then we knew where the power came from, didn’t we?” Snow was the stern voice and deceptively mild face of the Capitol, making pronouncements year-round, opening the Games, crowning victors. Everything else—Caesar, Claudius, the escorts, the movie stars—had been just a sick sideshow.

“And if we attack Snow head-on, they’ll know we’re serious.” She clicked her tongue thoughtfully. “I still think you’re trying to chase two foxes here, Haymitch. And we’re not gonna catch either. You heard Plutarch’s report. Support’s shaky and let’s be honest, I’m not exactly some shining beacon that can just get up there, say anything, and they’ll jerk off to the sound of it. We need to hook the districts in _now_. Fuck the Capitol for the minute. We’ll worry about them next propo, if there is one. Because if we don’t get the districts fired up, this little rebellion party isn’t happening. I’ll keep it in mind, but if I have to go after the Capitol a bit, I will.” She stared at him as if daring him to challenge her. “Not to mention if we go right after Snow now listing off all the shit he’s done to us, it looks purely personal.”

“ _Isn’t_ it personal?” he asked her mildly, trying to not betray the tension in him as he waited for her answer. She had good points, he had to admit. Maybe he was trying to keep everyone happy too much.

“You’re the one that’s been telling me I’ve gotta think bigger, dickwit,” she snapped, slapping a palm on the table.

He couldn’t help but smile at that. “So I am, sweet little festering rageball that you are.”

“Fuck you,” she grumbled, but he saw her smile in return, wincing slightly as her lip probably cracked a bit more at it. 

He raised his middle finger to her and smirked at her as he did it. “This is you, darlin’. Cheerfully flipping everyone off with everything you say. And yeah it’s annoying, even a bit shocking. But,” he reached over with his right hand and grabbed his finger, miming yanking it hard. “It’s easy to dismiss. And it breaks easy.” He closed his fingers into a fist. “This? Doesn’t. Painful, not so easy to ignore, mm?” He made sure she was looking at him. “When you speak up, hit ‘em where it hurts,” he told her quietly. “Don’t just annoy them. You packed a solid punch in the arena. Do it again.”

She looked at him, eyes narrowed, and looked ready to say something. Just then the _whoosh_ announced Plutarch’s return, balancing several bottles of water. Grey plastic, he noted with some amusement.

“I had to go through so many hoops for this, they’ve gotten so much stricter in thirty years,” Plutarch grumbled, sliding a bottle down to Haymitch and Johanna both before he took his seat. “Over simple water! We don’t have _water ration_ cards yet, you see, and I was taking it out of _the authorized dining area_ to boot.”

All at once it was like yesterday: the dry burn in his throat and the scent of rotten meat and iron from old blood that he couldn’t wash off reminded him of what it was like to strictly ration water. He felt like shit and he desperately wanted to drink the entire quart down, but he held himself to a sip or two to clear the nasty taste from his mouth, and screwed the lid back on tight. He looked down at his shaking hands, reassuring himself there was no blood caked into their creases—all he saw was the small scars the Capitol no longer bothered to scrub off once he was no longer saleable, and the smooth skin of his palms after they’d used pumice stones and lotion for the better part of a year right after his Games to make his “rough as an animal” hands appropriately soft.

Would it be like this the entire time in Thirteen, strict rations controlled by someone else? He looked at the bottle with its black screw-top and the white markings on the side denoting how much was left as the bottle was drunk down. It looked eerily like the water bottles in the parachutes. He eyed the other two bottles, sure that he could surreptitiously get both Johanna and Plutarch’s when they were done, and find _somewhere_ to fill them—a bathroom tap, even. And he could hide them wherever they ended up having him sleep. 

He wondered if they’d even let him shower, and kicked himself for getting so drunk that he didn’t even care if he was clean. Sobriety took that away. He’d showered twice, even three times a day when he reeked after training for the Quell. He hadn’t been able to shower in several days now, and already he felt filthy.

“Beetee and Wiress are awake. They think they can jam the Capitol signal for about two or three minutes for sure,” Plutarch said with a sigh. “It’s not much, but until they learn the patterns better, or something like that, it’s all they can guarantee.” 

“It’ll do,” Haymitch replied, forcing himself to look away from the water bottle, resisting the urge to protectively pull it closer. “So you’re getting your crew coming in?”

Plutarch nodded, chewing his lower lip slightly. “I asked them to get my crew, and all of the Twelve team that they could—whoever isn’t imprisoned.”

“You mentioned they had Cinna,” he remembered that now.  
“I’m hoping they left Portia and some of the preps alone by thinking they bagged the only prize in Cinna,” Plutarch said grimly. “I don’t know about Effie Trinket.”

Effie Trinket wouldn’t be much help to things here, but even with as blatantly stupid and offensive as she frequently was, he didn’t want her to die for his actions. “The Avoxes?” he asked. That had been a request he’d put in, knowing the boy was there for defiance in Twelve, and there was something funny about the girl and the way Katniss reacted to her. He wouldn’t have bet on their safety.

“We’ll see,” Plutarch answered. “They should have reported in, but all President Coin would say was that the camera crew was on board and that was all I really needed to know. They should be here in a couple of hours.”

“So we all noticed she’s not big on sharing, hm?” Johanna said sarcastically.

“I didn’t know it was like this in Thirteen now,” Plutarch muttered tiredly, massaging his temples. He couldn’t quite find it in himself to feel that bad for Plutarch right now. 

“I want a shower,” Johanna broke in. “A long one. Don’t make me look fake, but I’m not going on camera looking like I rolled around the sawmill floor.” He noticed she’d only taken a few sips of her water bottle too. Her first arena hadn’t lacked for fresh water. It must have been the jungle that taught her that. She smirked at him. “Haymitch could really use one too, by the looks of him. It’s not that hot in here for him to be sweating like that. Don’t need him stinking up the place.”

“Oh, fuck you, Johanna,” he muttered, but he was grateful. Had she used the casual insult to make that demand, for his sake? Probably—so maybe she was learning her own form of guile.

“Fine,” Plutarch said, barely concealing his impatience. “I’m sure when the preps get here some kind of showers will not be a problem. Can we discuss things here?”

“They’re being seen to in the med-bay?” Haymitch asked, needing to hear that.

“Yes,” Plutarch said, now definitely impatient. “And I imagine you won’t be able to see them until this propo is taped and wrapped up, so if you could focus, please?” So easy for Plutarch to put people from his mind—Haymitch never could.

“You overstated on Twelve, by the way,” he told Plutarch, since Coin wasn’t there to hear it. “They’re not ready to rebel. If anything, they’re even less inclined than they were six months ago.”

“But…” Plutarch said, shaking his head, eyes wide and startled. “Katniss is— _was_ —from Twelve.”

“Yeah, and it was great when it just meant a year of Parcel Days. But since we got the new Head Peacekeeper? To some peoples’ minds, she’s the reason they spent the last six months starving more than usual, toiling under higher quotas, and worried that cutting a loud fart just might get them hanged,” Haymitch said bluntly. He hated to say it in front of Johanna in some sense, given that it validated what she’d said about Katniss, but they’d find out soon enough when Plutarch’s expected triumphant uprising in Twelve fell flatter than griddlecakes. “Don’t get me wrong, some folk do still think highly of her. But a lot of them are anywhere from neutral to being pissed off that she brought it on them.”

“You really belong to a district of very judgmental fuckwads, you know,” Johanna said wryly.

“Wasn’t aware you were that popular at home either,” he shot back at her, instinctively moved to defend Twelve. Probably because being from the constant butt of national jokes, he felt the need to do so. “Twelve needs to go together. All or nothing. And they’re weaker and pushed harder than they were last winter, and guarded by about five times as many Peacekeepers. It ain’t gonna happen.”

Plutarch sighed. “Wonderful.”

Haymitch bristled. “Don’t make it sound like we did it to fuck you over, Heavensbee.” 

By the time a grey-uniformed minion arrived several hours later to tell them that the hovercraft had arrived with the preps, he’d gone through his bottle of water in spite of himself. When Plutarch left, having taken only a few sips of his bottle, Haymitch immediately moved to snatch it up. Then he looked over at Johanna, with her slack skin and cracked lips, and pushed it over towards her. “Here. You need it.”

She eyed it hungrily then looked at him. “Split it,” she said. 

“You’re the one going on camera, twit,” he insisted. “So drink up and shut up.”

“Such a gentleman,” she mocked him, but she didn’t protest as they followed Plutarch out the door. She leaned in close as they walked said in a low voice, “Are you fucked up from the booze or what?” she asked him bluntly. When he didn’t answer right away, she snorted softly and said, “You’re shaking, you look like hell, you apparently puked on the hovercraft ride—not that I’m judging, you at least hit the toilet—and your sweat stinks a little. So either you’ve got some really weird flu, or I figured it’s because you haven’t had a drink.”

Someone else would have asked more gently, _Are you OK?_ Not exactly Johanna Mason’s style, though. “Yeah,” he admitted, seeing no point to it. “It’s…not as bad as it was over the winter.” This was standing at a point of “somewhat inconvenient”. That had been sheer hell.

“Going to pass out in the middle of filming or what?”

“Don’t think so.” Though as his stomach flipped again, that queasy feeling of both hunger and nausea, he thought he might puke again.

At the elevator, they went down deeper into the warrens of Thirteen, and he felt the oppressive weight of being even further underground. Memories of those few weeks as a child that they’d sent him into the narrow mineshafts came back, and he tried to keep them at bay. Fuck, he hated this place already. 

They stopped on the fourteenth floor. Two Thirteen minions stepped forward and took custody of him, telling him they would escort him to his quarters for a shower then back to the studio. From the puzzled and shocked looks they gave him, he might as well have expressed a desire to fuck cats as to take an afternoon shower.

He ended up in another windowless steel box lit by harsh fluorescents, with two narrow beds tightly made up with pale grey sheets and a dark grey blanket, and a nightstand in between. Well, he supposed the grey color of the linens hid the dinginess of age that would have shown on white ones. “Shower is in the bathroom,” Minion One, a squat, blond man of about Haymitch’s own age said, pointing to the small cubicle with a toilet, sink, and shower. “You have a five minute water ration.”

“Who’s my roomie?” he muttered, eyeing the other bed, obviously unclaimed as well.

“Didn’t say just yet,” Minion Two replied. She was a slim, mahogany-skinned woman of roughly thirty with her reddish-tinged hair cropped to her collar. “I’d assume you’ll get one of the single men who arrived with you.”

“Schedule,” Minion One said impatiently. “You have five minutes to shower, five minutes to shave, and five to dress, then we’re to escort you back.”

He got the message. The shower was tiny—he seemed to bang his elbows on the wall every time he turned. There was no temperature control on the water, only an “on” button that he pressed to get a lukewarm stream. He hurriedly used the single squirt of shampoo and soap from the dispensers mounted in the shower, both totally devoid of any scent, and scrubbed himself down until he felt mostly human again. Closing his eyes, he wished he could have stayed in there about an hour and turned the heat up as well to let some of the weariness soak out of his bones, but hearing Minion One yell, “One minute, you’ll want to rinse if you haven’t,” made him sigh. He shaved quickly as well, not looking at himself in the mirror any more than he had to, not meeting his own eyes.

Putting back on his dirty clothes seemed to negate some of the good the shower had done. He’d worn them since the start of the Games, almost five days in a row now, since he couldn’t leave Mentor Central. He tried to not think of his ma’s advice to wear clean underwear when he went out, smiling wryly to himself.

“Sorry for the reminder, but fresh arrivals never know how to time a shower,” Minion Two said apologetically when he emerged from the bathroom. “And it’s better that you’re not caught with soap suds in your hair.”

“You’ll also need a haircut,” Minion One muttered. “Long hair is a waste, and the regulations for men won’t allow it.”

“Oh, by all means,” he said cheerfully. He’d hated the jaw-length hair ever since the Capitol saw him with it one year at Reaping Day because he couldn’t get anyone to cut it beforehand, and decided he simply _had_ to keep that look. He didn’t remark that their president’s hair was long, falling to her shoulders. No point prodding them about it. Rank had its privileges, clearly.

Minion Two said, “If we’re getting him a haircut, we might as well stop him by Supply first and get some clothes too. You look like you’ve worn those for days, Abernathy.”

“Since the Games started,” he admitted, oddly moved by the courtesy and kindness. Not what he was used to in strangers, especially not in this oddly clinical place.

“Roembel,” Minion One growled, “you’d best remember this isn’t a resort.” But he relented and said, “Fine.”

At Supply, they stared at his waist with that same openly judgmental look he’d seen on others already in this place. The supplymaster slapped a bundle of fabric down on the the counter and groused, “You don’t get new clothes when you lose the weight. It’s still perfectly good fabric. You just cinch your belt tighter. Got it?”

“Got it,” he said coolly, irritated that they were treating him like some silly Capitolite. He well remembered tightening belts and using fabric until it was rags incapable of patching. Changed into the dark grey trousers and pale grey shirt—clean underwear as well, and he was amused it was white rather than grey—he neatly bundled up his jacket, vest, shirt, and trousers. Maybe they could be washed, at least.

The barber tried to insist on shaving him down into close-cropped hair like most of the other men he’d seen, and Haymitch balked at that. He wasn’t in the mood to lurch from a hairstyle inflicted by the Capitol to one inflicted by Thirteen, both of which he hated. “Just cut it short for now,” Minion Two suggested. “The regulations don’t insist on shaved down.”

He left a pile of shaggy shorn dark hair on the matte grey rubber flooring, walking out now with an unruly mess of short curls, making him feel lighter and tidy than he had in years without his hair hanging in his eyes. Minion One departed, grunting about having better things to do. He risked a grateful glance at Minion Two—Roembel? She leaned in as she pushed the elevator button. “I came from Eleven a dozen years ago,” she said softly. Well, that explained her coloring, and her sympathy. “It’s a hard adjustment at first here, I know.” 

Nodding in acknowledgment of that, he asked quietly, “Got a first name?”

“Goldenrod,” she said with pursed lips and a self-conscious sigh. “By the eighth kid, my parents were runnin’ out of names, sure enough.” My friends call me ‘Dena’, though.” The way she looked at him, dark eyes giving him a sidelong glance, was either flirtatious or shyly friendly. He’d been away from normal women long enough, or at least been a creature that normal women wouldn’t throw a flirtatious glance at, that he really wasn’t sure which. But it made a hell of a lot more sense for it to be the latter, though. Wasn’t much to look at, even after a shave and a haircut. 

She left him on the twenty-ninth floor, at the studio with the advice, “Might want to tuck in that shirt, they’re gonna complain otherwise.” He cheerfully ignored that. 

He saw that Peeta’s stylist Portia was there already, working like an energetic magpie, her twin turquoise braids swinging briskly down her back as she adjusted the cuffs of Johanna’s shirt, colored the same pale grey as his. “Couldn’t find anything else on hand,” she said with a sigh, “so we’ll have to just make do.”

“They’ll focus on what I’m saying then,” Johanna grumbled, “rather than what I’m wearing.” She’d showered, brown hair still faintly damp, but the cuts and bruises and dark circles beneath her eyes still showed clearly. 

“Cinna?” he asked her, well aware the two were lovers.

Portia looked over her shoulder for a moment, lips pressed tightly together. She looked away and shook her head. “We don’t know,” she said softly. “Nobody’s heard from his since the opening day of the Games.”

 _Shit_. He stepped back and decided to leave Portia to her work. “No preps?” he asked Plutarch.

“They’re here,” Plutarch answered, “but as it’s just minimal tailoring, and no cleaning up of Johanna’s flaws—“

“ _Flaws_?” he bit the word off sharply.

“No makeup,” Plutarch amended coolly, as if humoring the outburst of an angry child, “we figured they weren’t necessary right now. Besides, we need to hurry and get these cameras rolling.” He gestured to a pair already fiddling with the camera—the woman was obviously Capitol with those green vine tattoos circling her face including her bald-shaved head, and the young man beside her had three piercings in each ear, including one that stretched his earlobes down wide enough to probably pass a fresh walnut through the hole. Catching him speaking, Haymitch saw the metallic glint of a tongue stud as well.

In just a few minutes, it was all ready to go. Hesitant, feeling useless to do anything but watch the taping, he debated whether he should stay, or go see to the others in the med-bay. Peeta ought to be out of surgery, maybe was already waking up. Would he do more good there? Then he watched Johanna sitting in that room, a lonely figure in drab grey clothing against a drab grey backdrop. He’d told her he’d stick with her and help her. No, right now, the best thing he could do was stay and make sure it went well, make sure she wasn’t surrounded only by Capitolites and unfamiliar Thirteen citizens.

So he took a seat in the control booth, slipped on a pair of headphones for the audio, and watched as the camerawoman down in the studio held up the countdown.

Johanna eyed the camera defiantly. “We all know that Katniss Everdeen is dead. And President Snow wants us to think that’s it. We’re done. Our heart’s somehow been ripped out and we can’t go on. But let’s talk about reality. The Capitol told us we were all supposed to be deliriously in love with her, that her romance was so touching, so inspiring to everyone. None of us gave much of a fuck about that. On her Victory Tour, while the Capitol was celebrating how _wonderful_ she and Peeta Mellark were, we weren’t caught up in her little romance, because we live in the real world, not a fairy tale. While she was forced into dancing at a Capitol-paid party in District Seven, the district was mourning two more dead kids—as usual. I imagine it was the same in every district but Twelve, and even there, people were starving and other kids were dying. Fairy-tale romance is too unreal to matter out in the districts.”

He tensed, wondering if he’d fucked up, hearing her angry accusations again, seeing her eyes flaring with anger. “So no, Katniss Everdeen was nothing remarkable. She loved people she didn’t want to lose, same as everyone. The only thing that made her different was that we were grateful that for once, someone managed to make the Capitol think that the things a district person loved actually mattered. We loved her for that, even as we hated her, because we were still dirt to them. And in the end, didn’t matter, because she was just like us—and _that’s_ what mattered. She _was_ one of us. She was a seventeen-year-old girl who was brave and who loved her sister, loved her boyfriend, who tried to fight for them as best she could, and in the end, she still got killed because Coriolanus Snow decided she was inconvenient. And if even the Capitol’s favorite can be so casually killed just for being inconvenient, then none of us have anything left to lose, do we?” 

He breathed out a sigh of relief as she turned away from savaging a dead girl’s reputation. Oddly touched as well—strangely, it was in emphasizing how very ordinary Katniss was that Johanna showed she’d understood Katniss far better than Haymitch had imagined. Strip away the Capitol hysteria and the silk and feathers, and she’d been just a Seam girl thrust out into a world she hadn’t wanted, one who loved fiercely and feared enough to lose what she loved that she’d done her best to fight for it. As a man who’d known the girl underneath the glossy Capitol lacquer, he’d call it a more fitting tribute than many others might have done.

She sat there, silent for a long few moments, and drew in a deep breath. “We’re all angry. We’ve all suffered. Our hearts got ripped out long ago if we’ve lost, or else they’re chained up by fear because we’re so fucking afraid of losing what little we have left. Here’s the truth. All our submission, all our playing along and following all the rules, doesn’t amount to a damn thing when Snow decides we need to become an example. I was sixteen when I became a tribute for nothing I did, no better reason than keeping District Seven terrified. I was seventeen when Coriolanus Snow murdered my family when I wouldn’t do exactly what he wanted. A lot of what I am now, is because of that.” A small smile crossed her lips. “But that’s more truth, better for another day. There’s a lot of shit Snow’s been keeping buried, and the nation deserves to know it. We’ll keep it simple for now though. We’re at a crossroads. People are pissed off. You’re tired of being told you have no worth except as a slave. You saw that to Coriolanus Snow, even Katniss Everdeen meant nothing but a threat to be eliminated. So I say we show him he’s right. We’re all threats, and he’s feared us long enough. We’re tougher than he thinks. We know how to endure hardship.” She shook her head, reached up and brushed her hair back from her forehead, unknowingly exposing a purpling bruise there, vivid and ugly. “Nobody is going to be able to come and save you. You have to be willing to fight for yourself. Remember this—he can’t put everyone in an arena.” A grin lit up her face, something mischievous but also gleeful, something that made her look strangely young and beautiful, unlike the damaged creature of spite and rage she seemed far too often. “And he’s seen if he tries, we’re not as helpless as he’d like. We can find ways to mess up his plans.” 

Plutarch hit the button to the director’s microphone and said, “Cressida, twenty seconds, let’s keep this tight.”

They must have conveyed that to Johanna. Haymitch kept watching the screen and the way she didn’t look away, defying Snow with that level gaze. “So fight back now, while you can. Not for the Mockingjay. You fight for you, and for your own, and for the right to make them admit you have more worth than your death on a television screen. The rebellion didn’t die with Katniss Everdeen. It only dies if we all decide that Snow is right, that we as people are nothing except his pawns, that our freedom and our dignity isn’t worth jack-shit. This is going to be the best chance you’ll ever have to have something more for you and your kids than tesserae and Reaping Day and dying too young. _Take it._ ”

The screen cut to black, and Haymitch took off the headphones. His hands trembled with a little more than the jitters of no alcohol. Had they done it? Now began the waiting, the toughest part, as they saw the result of it all. He pressed the button for the microphone down into the studio, where they all could hear it. “And that, friends,” he said with a glance and a smirk over at Plutarch, “is how you fire up a rebellion.” As he looked at her next, he couldn’t see well from this distance, through the thick plate glass, but he thought Johanna smiled.


	9. Chapter 9

Johanna sat there in the hard, uncomfortable chair, taking in a deep breath. She’d done it. Gotten through the stupid taping and survived it, and not said anything harsh as she wanted. As Cressida, the director, shut down the cameras, air swift and confident as she rattled off instructions to her pierced underling, Johanna stared at her green vine tattoos again. Pressed her lips together and swallowed her anger, trying to not ask just what right the Capitol bitch thought she had to steal tattoos based on the traditional clan Willow design from Seven. Johanna was Maple herself; her family’s wedding furniture had the maple leaf design carved into it, had for several generations now, but she’d had friends that were Willow, growing up. 

“Nice ink you’ve got,” she couldn’t resist saying, trying for a tone of nonchalance rather than accusation.

“I saw it on a documentary about Seven and thought it looked lovely,” Cressida said absentmindedly. “I got the tattoos done to celebrate my graduating film school.”

“Of course you did.” Cressida hadn’t earned the right to wear that design, wasn’t born Willow and picked up an axe and risked the dangers of the summer forest or worked around saws with cold-numbed fingers in the mills and workshops of the winter town, but like any Capitol prick, she thought just because she liked something, she had a right to it. Johanna resisted the urge to want to peel Cressida’s skin off and remove the offense, her fingers clenched as she pushed up from the chair and resolved to walk past the woman without attacking her. This woman, this weird mix of not-Capitol daring rebelliousness and totally-Capitol offensive obliviousness was her _ally_? If Cressida, and Plutarch with his carefully designed arena, were the best allies the Capitol had to offer the rebellion, how the hell could she ever fully trust someone like them? 

As she headed up to the control booth, not wanting to be around Cressida and her boy wonder a moment longer, Haymitch nodded to her, his slight smile telling her he was pleased. Though his words had already done that, and given what an asshole he could be with cutting remarks, she trusted he’d have been honest if she’d been total crap. 

Plutarch chortled with glee, clapping his hands together. “Oh, this I can work with,” he assured her.

“Goodie,” she said dryly. The door opened with a whoosh, and Nuts and Volts stood there. Showered as well, and like her, the cuts and bruises stood out all the starker on their clean skin. Wiress was nursing a beautiful black eye on her right side, blooming up dark purple against that ashy gold skin. “Who clocked you?” she asked, nodding to it. It had all been such confusion as she tried to reach Peeta that she wasn’t sure if someone had punched through their lines and gotten to Wiress. From the look of it, they had. Either that, or the woman had tripped over her own feet.

“Enobaria,” Wiress said. A slightly mad-looking smile flitted across her lips, and she raked a hand through her drab brown hair with its riot of ringlets, making it fly out in all directions. “Measure for measure.”

“Assuming she’s alive,” Beetee interpreted, looking at Wiress with relieved admiration, “I’m afraid that Enobaria’s going to be viewing the world out of one eye now. I’m not certain, though. The stab may well have gone into the brain.”

So the idiot had underestimated Wiress when she attacked. Johanna let out a lot whistle, impressed despite herself. “Nicely done, Mightymouse,” she complimented the little Three victor. “Didn’t know you had it in you.” Drab and quiet and half-cracked as she might have been, and forty-five to boot, apparently the little mouse had a fierce bite when it came down to it.

Wiress just smiled again, this one enigmatic and a little sad. “Life—and death—just a matter of anatomy and physics.”

“Right. Leaving that stuff to you Three types,” Haymitch said, eyeing Wiress with that calculating expression of his, as if he was adding things up again in his head to classify her. “Plutarch,” now there was a moment of open concern, and a worried glance towards the door, “look, you just need to edit now—nothing I can do here, right?”

“They reported Peeta might be awake soon when Wiress and I left the infirmary to clean up,” Beetee said, gesturing to his own drab grey Thirteen clothing. “We’ve got it handled, Haymitch. Don’t worry.”

“Thanks,” Haymitch acknowledged, and some of his frazzled air dissipated. He headed for the door as Wiress slid into a seat at the console, fingers already playing with the many dials and buttons with a rapid certainty. As Johanna watched, she heard Haymitch clear his throat. Looking over at him, she saw he’d stopped and turned back. “You coming?” he asked Johanna abruptly.

“What, be on the agony committee?” she said sarcastically. “I don’t think this place is gonna let us have a fruit basket for condolences.”

Haymitch raised an eyebrow, jaw tightening. “Well, then you’re welcome to stare at your own video all afternoon,” he said, returning her acid tone in equal measure, “and sorry if I thought _the Almighty Phoenix_ might actually be concerned.”

She was about to go off on him, telling him that they didn’t want her there anyway and it would just be awkward and terrible, but she stopped herself. This was her chance, wasn’t it? Maybe it was best to start so close to home. Looking at him, his still-exhausted appearance, the tension in him like he was fighting some kind of discomfort—no booze, she assumed—it dawned on her that he didn’t want to face Peeta alone. Maybe he feared Peeta condemning him, or maybe just bawling. 

As someone who’d been there when Katniss died, maybe she could be a buffer. The desire to not get tangled up in everyone else’s shit warred with the notion that she ought to get involved, ought to care, ought to do what she could. She looked back towards the chair in the studio. She’d told the entire nation they ought to give a shit about things, and get off their asses and do something about it. The last thing she wanted to be was a hypocrite. “I wasn’t sure,” she said, picking her words with care, “you wanted me messing in what amounts to District Twelve victor business.” If she’d tried chatting with any other district’s tribute during any Games, it would have provoked a damn riot with the Gamemakers for trying to influence the Games. 

He visibly relaxed a little, eyebrows easing down from where they’d been knit together in consternation. It almost hurt to see how little it took to please the idiot. “It ain’t mentors and tributes anymore,” he told her. “The Games rules don’t apply.” 

She nodded, accepting that. “Gonna take a while until it sinks in.”

“Gonna take a while to win this war as well,” he pointed out, as she fell in step by his side.

Another of the Thirteen minions stepped up as they exited the studio—a woman, tall and dark and curvaceous in a way that reminded Johanna of a piece of well-turned blackspire. “Infirmary, Dena,” Haymitch told her. “Sorry you’re stuck on shepherd duty again.”

 _Dena?_ For fuck’s sake. The man was on a first name basis with the minion already? If it was anyone else, Johanna would have called it flirtatious. Still, Dena-the-Minion gave him an amused look and nodded, gesturing for the two of them to follow. Following her through the twists and turns of the place, a veritable maze of steel, Johanna tried to suppress the uncomfortable sense of being trapped, and her senses told her that everything around her was as utterly artificial as an arena. If she could have, she’d have bolted outside and tried to calm down. As was, she was left trying to deal with a constant low-grade edginess about it. Fully relaxing in this place might well be impossible.

Stopping in front of a door helpfully labeled in large shining cut-steel letters, “Infirmary,” their escort turned to them one last time. “Well, here you go. I suppose they’ll start you on schedules soon enough, but I don’t imagine you’ve eaten since last night.”

“Nope,” Johanna answered, suddenly aware again of the pangs of hunger in her stomach. The arena showed her she’d gotten soft since her first Games, too used to having food whenever she wanted it. She was initially touched and then made suspicious by the thoughtfulness. What was Dena-the-Minion after? And what was that about schedules? 

“Dinner will be in an hour, at 1830,” Dena mentioned, her voice surprisingly soft and light for a solid woman. “Don’t be late. Chow line shuts down ten minutes after.”

“Got it,” Haymitch said distractedly, looking at the infirmary door intently. Nothing as obvious as trepidation showed on his carefully blank face, but she saw the slight narrowing of his eyes, how he squared his shoulders, before he stepped forward to trigger the door.

The beds were lined up in rows, curtains drawn between them for privacy. After a few quiet words with one of the infirmary staff in their grey scrubs, Johanna saw that Haymitch’s hand hesitated only a moment before he drew aside the curtain. 

Peeta lay there on his back, and she had the sense he’d have curled in on himself if it wouldn’t hurt so damn much. “They say you’re gonna keep the le—“ Haymitch began.

Peeta’s fair skin was pale from the blood loss, almost as white as the finely bleached paper rolling out of Seven’s mills in winter, so that the winter town reeked the entire season of the chemicals. Only the blotches on his face and his bright red nose and the puffy rawness of his eyes gave any color. Obviously he’d been crying hard already, and in the manner where it hurt so fucking much the notion of looks didn’t even enter into the picture. Snot dripped out of his nose and fresh tears rolled down his cheeks even as Johanna watched.

He looked up at the two of them with the look of mute appeal she’d seen on wounded animals, too exhausted to keep fighting, wanting nothing more than a release from the pain. ”She’s gone,” he said, his voice catching on the last word, and his shoulders hitched in another sob. It obviously hurt because he flinched, and tried to wipe his nose with the back of his hand.

"Here," Haymitch said, shoving a handkerchief into Peeta’s hand. “Why the hell didn’t they give you…” She wasn’t surprised he did that. She’d never seemed to have one on hand when she was seventeen and the crying jags came over her swift and sudden as a summer lightning storm. She tried to not cry in the house, though, where Snow might hear, or where anyone else in Seven might see. Her family’s trees at the memorial grove got watered with plenty of her tears those first couple of years.

“We’ll make Snow pay for it,” she promised Peeta, hearing the rough and fierce edge in her voice. Time for her to try to do what she could for him, poor little as it was—all she could do was give him the chance for a reckoning. 

Peeta looked at her, shaking his head. “Do you think that matters? She’s _still dead_!” His voice rose shrilly, breaking on the last words. “She’s still dead,” he repeated, voice now softer, and a fresh sob hit him again as he bit his lip. “I couldn’t…I _tried_ to…” 

“Peeta,” Haymitch said, the name coming almost sharp off his lips, the air of command to it as if he expected it to cut through Peeta’s drowning in his own emotions. “Peeta,” he said it again, now softer as the boy looked up at him, a plea in his bright blue eyes as if somehow Haymitch could say or do something to make it go away. Seventeen and a victor he might be, but in that glance, she saw clearly that Peeta Mellark was still a child, looking up to an adult to make it all better. She felt like she could barely remember seventeen and the shreds of innocence. “You did what you could,” he told Peeta. “We all did everything we could. It was bad luck.”

“Bad luck and Plutarch Heavensbee,” Johanna muttered, unable to help it. Haymitch shot her an angry look. “Bad luck and Coriolanus Snow, _fine_ ,” she amended it. It did come down to Snow in the end, wasn’t like Plutarch would have got his jollies by coming up with a Quell, and he was right. She’d best pick her targets and hit them precisely rather than just flinging axes everywhere hoping to strike something, deserved or not. “Look, I know we’re not exactly cuddly types, but OK, Haymitch and I, we’ve dealt with this…”

“What?” Peeta said, obviously confused now, wiping his nose again with the handkerchief, looking back and forth between them. “What do you mean?”

“Snow killed my family,” Johanna said, hearing the words come out harsh with pain and fury still, “just like he did Haymitch’s.” 

“Wait, Snow _killed your family_?” Peeta looked at Haymitch, mouth half-open in astonishment. Johanna found herself doing the same. He hadn’t told them? It felt strange. It seemed like _everyone_ knew. But then again, that revelation came as part of the standard “do what I tell you and don’t fuck up or you’ll end up like Haymitch” speech by Snow. Still, she was surprised Peeta and Katniss hadn’t gotten that speech.

“You lived next door to them for a year and didn’t tell them?” Johanna blurted in astonishment before she could swallow the words. 

Haymitch shot her a positively poisonous look. Caught aback, suddenly she was glad there were no sharp objects within reach, unless Haymitch ripped the IV needle out of Peeta’s arm. “I wasn’t aware you had that many heart-to-hearts with Blight and Ced in your first year,” he said, the heat of anger barely controlled in his tone. He had a point there. Neither of them had prepared her for anything—the mentoring, the whoring. But Haymitch was closer to the kids than either Blight or Cedrus had been to her. She’d assumed…then she saw the flicker of guilt in his expression. Not just about not telling Peeta. Some things were hard to bring up, and given how combative Haymitch and Katniss had been from what Johanna saw, it wasn’t like the girl exactly gave him good opportunities to lay open his raw emotional wounds like that. Still—he’d let them walk in blind, and that startled her, as overprotective as he was of both of them, and pissed as he’d been that Blight left her hanging when she came back to the Capitol her first year.

“I had assumed that Snow told you,” Haymitch said to Peeta, words slow and very controlled. “He never exactly hid it as a card to play in keeping victors in line. When Katniss mentioned in Eleven that Snow had warned her about…about the consequences. And I figured just maybe you two decided it was better to just leave it alone and not ask. You seemed scared enough up there in the Justice Building, like he’d given you sharp enough warning...”

“Snow didn’t tell her that,” Peeta said. “If he had, she would have told me.” His face twisted in confusion. “She’d have told me,” he repeated, gaze flicking rapidly away from the two of them, as if trying to convince himself of that notion.

Haymitch finally seemed to get a grip. “He killed them,” he agreed. “Because of what I did with the forcefield—I saw you and K—her—watching the tape. They edited the broadcasts after that. Made it look like I just caught that axe and threw it back. I wasn’t supposed to win—Twelve boy against a One girl? Wasn’t supposed to make them look stupid, making their prison into my weapon.” It struck her anew that it was all in the spin. The Capitol could just as easily have painted that as the brilliance of an underdog using any means at his disposal. “So Snow killed them, eleven days after he stuck that fucking crown on my head. My ma. My little brother, Ash.” His voice went even lower. “My girl, Briar.” Peeta looked at him, eyes wide and startled. “Briar was sixteen,” Haymitch went on. “Three months older than me. Ash wasn’t even twelve yet.” The faraway look and melancholy tone faded as he glanced back at Peeta. “It won’t be easy,” he told Peeta. “But you’ll find a way to keep going.” 

“What other choice do I have?” Peeta said with a dark, painful laugh.

“You can push on or you can off yourself and let Snow win,” Johanna said bluntly. “Don’t.” Although given the alternative was turning out a hot fucking mess, maybe she should have wandered out into the snow one day and never come back. Haymitch’s words came back to her with too much ease, about how he’d never wanted her to become like him. Looking at Peeta, of course Haymitch wouldn’t want him to turn out like that either.

Haymitch gave her another of those irritated looks, but Peeta looked at her more calmly now. “Who did you lose?”

“My mom, my dad, my older brother Bern, my younger sister Heike.” She shrugged, striving for nonchalance. “Sorry, I didn’t lose a boyfriend.” If there was one saving grace in her old friend Rhus waiting to tell her until _after_ she’d come back from the Capitol the second time, orphaned and alone and whored out, it was that it meant Snow hadn’t seen him as a target. In the end, rejecting him was all to the good. “Do I get kicked out of this little club for it?”

“Jo,” Haymitch growled.

“What did you do that Snow killed them?” Peeta asked. “Katniss and I watched your Games and I didn’t see anything...” Maybe the boy was trying to forge a connection here, desperately reaching out to her and understand, find common ground in their mutual losses. But Johanna suppressed a shudder, thinking of the kids watching her sixteen-year-old self in that garden hellhole, first wild with terror and then ruthlessly determined to do whatever it took to survive. If Haymitch’s tape was unedited too, had they seen Clark, the boy from Five, pinning her down in the dirt, roughly trying to yank at her zipper, Johanna’s panicked flailing leading to her seizing the axe and not stopping until long after Clark was dead? She felt far more naked around Peeta then than she had in the elevator with her entire body exposed. She felt like she was standing there in that arena again in the blood-soaked ruin of a torn, fine green linen tunic, trying to not see the barely-human mess that had been Clark from Five. Then, she’d picked up the axe, found a stream, and cleaned herself off, received her first sponsor parachute. Washed and torn up the remains of the tunic to make wraps for her hands and knees, since the arena was warm enough at night that her tank top was enough, and shinnied up a tree to make her plan on how to get out of there alive. She’d gotten on with things, and the Gamemakers pretended she’d planned it all along. But in that moment, frozen there in disbelief with all of Panem watching, she felt so humiliatingly exposed just like she did now.

“I… _misbehaved_ my first year as a mentor,” she said, hearing the stiffness in her own voice. “Let’s leave it there, and focus on you, huh?” She couldn’t tell him—not yet, it still burned too shamefully in her for her to find the right words. Most people already hated her. Worse yet, he might pity her. Though the still, small voice in the back of her mind asked her smugly, _And if you can’t tell one teenage boy, sweetie, just how do you plan to tell the entire nation?_

She had to admit she had no good answer to that one.

~~~~~~~~~~

Thirteen was a dank, drab, stale-smelling place. For someone from District One, growing up accustomed to even the most mundane object regularly being turned into a work of art, the depressingly blank steel walls and bare fluorescent bulbs here in Thirteen unnerved Chantilly. Even as a kid in the Academy, as harsh and demanding as the training had been, One’s love of beautiful things to creep in. It was funny how much difference coming back to something simple as the cheery orange and yellow paint in her dorm room could be after getting her ass kicked in sparring that day.

But if the Academy and the victor program taught her one thing, it was how to take orders. Ever since she was six and made the cut to enter as a student, she’d been taking someone’s direction: Academy teachers and trainers, then senior victors and Capitolites. Surrounded by her birth family, then her classmates, then fellow victors in Victors’ Square, then sharing the house with Niello, and then the kids—she’d never really been _alone_. 

True, she had Cashmere, as politely and frostily respectful as they’d always been. And she had friends here alongside her—Clover, Haymitch, Blight, the remnants of the sarcastically self-dubbed “Young Whores of Panem” club, though Angus had died in the arena, killed by Gloss. But she felt Niello’s absence like a lost limb, and in some ways, they might have cut the umbilical six years ago on Citrine and Sardonyx, but she felt like they’d been truly severed from her now. She’d never had to leave them with other victors in the Square before, because ever since their birth she’d been allowed to stay home—the Capitol didn’t want a forty-year-old One victor hanging around anyway. She felt the sudden plunge in her stomach, the terror of not knowing what was happening to them, and if they’d be safe. What the hell had she done, agreeing to this?

She’d never felt more alone than right then, with everyone she loved taken away from her. Niello might be dead right now. Glancing across the table at Haymitch, she wondered how he’d managed it all these years, left alone as he’d been. Up close and personal as she’d been to him every summer as his friend, she’d been able to trace the slow decay. A day of it and she was falling apart already. No wonder he’d taken to the bottle so damn hard.

“Got a flask of rotgut hidden away in your boot?” she muttered to him as she picked at her mashed turnips, like a flavorless paste devoid of any seasoning at all. Everyone seated at long tables like this, intent on their meal and with only murmurs of conversation and no laughter, it was like the Academy cafeteria all over again. Although she didn’t imagine those lanky and spotted sixteen-year-olds would be expected to fight and steal each other’s food in order to eat, preparing for the arena and the inevitable breakup of the pack.

Haymitch gave one of those sharp barks of sarcastic laughter. “No booze here, they tell me. I’m fucked.” She looked at him closer now, jolted out of her own problems, and saw how he was sweating slightly even in the slightly cool air, even as he looked like he was shivering simultaneously.

“You want fucked,” Cashmere said irritably, dropping her spoon onto her metal tray with a loud _clack_ , “let’s talk about the ones we left behind?”

“Oh, by all means,” Johanna said sarcastically, staring at Cashmere with the fierce expression of a hawk readying to strike. “You’ve got a gripe worse than anything that’s ever happened to anyone else at this table, Cash, let’s go ahead and hear it.”

“Let it go,” Haymitch muttered to Johanna. “Go ahead, Cash, have at it,” he said wearily. “We left Gloss behind. We left Finnick behind.” He nodded to Annie Cresta, who squeezed her eyes shut tightly, chewing on her lip as if fighting images inside her own head. “We left Enobaria behind too for that matter.” Brutus shifted uncomfortably, avoiding all of their eyes, suddenly deeply interested in the grey mystery meat on his tray.

“You’re damn lucky they put you on that hovercraft at all, Cash,” Clover said smartly. “Considering you were trying to fuck up the plan.” She nodded to Chantilly. “I imagine you can thank Tilly for insisting on that.”

“Leave me out of it, Chloe,” Chantilly muttered wearily, rubbing her eyes. She wasn’t in the mood to turn it into a squabble right now, because it brought up the memories of talking it over with Niel before they took it to Haymitch, and having to accept that her husband would stay behind. Besides, she knew Cashmere better than any of them anyway, knew that she was just lashing out because she was frantic over Gloss, trying to deal with the guilt of being rescued. Clover had been her friend for decades now, and maybe it hadn’t been easy to have a secret husband screwed up by the Capitol who she saw only a month of every year, but compared to the rest of them, Clover came out a winner on this particular day. Her husband was right there with her, safe and sound. Though there was the matter of Ami…maybe that was making her pick fights. Chantilly could sympathize. 

“It was impossible,” Beetee said quietly. “I calculated it would have taken another five min—“

“Nobody gives a fuck about your specific calculations right now, Beetee,” Lyme said, but her tone and her expression weren’t unkind. 

“Of course not,” Beetee acknowledged. “My point is that there genuinely was no time to grab the last three victors. Thirty seconds more and we’d have been shot down.”

They could debate that as long as they liked. It didn’t change the outcome. Only one thing could help start to bandage the wound even a little. Chantilly glanced over at Haymitch pointedly. “I’m sure we’ll do everything they can to get Gloss, and everyone else, back.” It wasn’t exactly a question. She also had vested interest in what he said, after all. 

“Of course,” Haymitch said. Smooth-tongued liar he might be towards the Capitol—she’d helped train him, so she knew that firsthand—but he didn’t lie to his own, and he did his best to look out for the other victors. He wouldn’t have sold them out. She’d seen him in that hovercraft arguing heatedly with Plutarch about having to leave before the whole thing got shot down. It was Plutarch who’d brought up the idea, Plutarch who insisted. She’d have a hard time forgetting the look on Haymitch’s face in that moment—the bitter disappointment, anger, and shame. He blamed himself, as usual. In that, not much had changed from the seventeen-year-old boy she’d met long ago, who tried too hard to pretend he was a flippant and snarky brat to cover just how much he felt things.

Cashmere shook her head, not quite mollified, wavy blond hair falling in her face and hiding her eyes as she bent lower over her tray. Chantilly couldn’t help but think that it was deliberate, like drawing a curtain of privacy. “You’d better,” she muttered, jabbing at the turnips again like she was stabbing them with her paired butterfly swords. Chantilly wondered if she’d seen Cashmere while passing by the younger kids on her way to instruct the older Diamond prospects—“polishing the Diamonds” was the joking way the victors put their Academy responsibilities. Had Cashmere been one of many eleven-year-old youngsters graduated to weapons training, spending hours at a practice dummy, working with her chosen weapon, learning exactly where to strike? The sweet spots for edged weapons of guts, throat, the thigh—not likely to bind the blade in bone like a chest strike would. Deadly precise as she was with a blade, Cash’s tongue was just as sharp.

“How’s Peeta?” Annie brought up, eyes clear once again, and Chantilly felt the gratitude of the subject change.

“Awake,” Haymitch grunted, his fingers tightening on the handle of his knife as he sawed at the meat.

The table fell silent at that. “That’s good,” Blight finally ventured.

“So we find out soon enough how that whole propo thing went,” Clover added. They all shot looks at Johanna as if still in disbelief that they’d hang the whole thing on her, of all people. Chantilly had her doubts as well. Johanna had always been rough-edged, angry, and forceful when finesse would do it. Yes, she’d learned the basics of camera presence as any victor did, especially one whored out, but she’d never gotten far into it enough to make it truly instinctive. 

Not her call to make, though. And it wasn’t like Katniss Everdeen had been a powerhouse on camera either—clumsy and obvious as anything. 

They weren’t left waiting long. Even as dinner finished, they were summoned to President Coin’s side up in Command. “I asked for Abernathy and Mason,” the woman said, her features a tightly controlled iron-like mask.

“You said ‘the victors’, ma’am,” one of the soldiers corrected her quietly. “I assumed…”

“Fine,” Coin said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “They might as well all stay. We’ll have to discuss their situation here after the broadcast anyway.”

“Broadcast?” Cashmere ventured cautiously, brushing a lock of hair back behind her ear.

“President Snow has announced mandatory programming at 1930,” Coin answered. “I assume it’s in response to the broadcast we issued an hour ago.”

“Quick turnaround,” Blight observed.

“Too quick,” Haymitch said, eyes narrowed and lips pressed tightly together for a moment. “He was ready.”

Taking seats around the table, they waited the ten minutes until the triumphant brass-heavy anthem played, with the symbol of the Capitol displayed on the screen. Everyone else in the Command station stopped what they were doing to watch as well.

President Snow stood in the Presidential Mansion’s newscast room, a familiar sight to any Panem citizen. The same tied-back navy blue velvet drapes alongside a projection of the seal of the Capitol, the twelve symbols of the districts arrayed equally around it in a circle. Snow at the mahogany lectern, a microphone alongside the white rose on his lapel. “I’m aware many of you have been left with unanswered questions about events which occurred in your districts today. Particularly given the broadcast shared with you by Johanna Mason an hour ago. I regret to inform you that late last night at midnight, after the mandatory broadcast had concluded at 11 PM, the victors involved in the Third Quarter Quell conspired to sabotage the Games, with an idea to starting a rebellion against this nation.” Behind him, the tape began to roll, showing the final battle among the trees, and the sudden surge of electricity, the screen fading to black.

Snow’s gaze lifted to stare straight at the cameras. “There will be no broadcast of the remaining portion of last night’s Games. But to update the nation upon the status of things: Finnick Odair, Enobaria Reska, and Gloss Donovan were casualties of that final battle.” She heard the sudden cries behind her, muffled into a hand, and reached out instinctively to touch Cashmere’s shoulder, feeling her tense and shaking.

“He’s lying,” Cashmere growled, “he’s lying, he’s lying…” In her heart, Cashmere knew he wasn’t. If they hadn’t been dead when they were pulled from the arena, Snow probably made sure they were dead. And it gave her the sinking feeling that Niel and the others were dead too. 

“Several other victors serving as mentors are in custody for questioning,” Snow went on coolly. Chantilly’s clenched fingers eased slightly. Niel was alive. He was still alive, and she felt the guilt of her sudden joy alongside Cashmere’s searing grief. “However, remaining at large are the following victors identified as having been involved in the rebel plot: Chantilly Forbes Dumas, Lyme Rathbone, Brutus Allemand, Beetee Latier, Wiress Parker, Annelle Cresta, Blight Arnesson, Johanna Mason, Clover Anden, Chaff McCormick, Peeta Mellark, and Haymitch Abernathy. Head Gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee is also involved deeply in this plot.”

“I didn’t have _shit_ to do with this,” Brutus interrupted angrily, sounding hurt. She could have sighed, knowing that to ever-loyal Brutus, being called a traitor was about the worst fate he could imagine.

“These so-called rebels have rejected the Capitol’s generosity. For years, they’ve been privileged. The nation has taken care of them, rewarded them with riches, raised them out of their humble beginnings, and now they leave you to pay the price of their meddling, trying to bring you all the horrors of war. To that end, I give the people of Panem an opportunity. Those among you who can produce any one of these traitors, alive or dead, will receive a bounty equal to a victor’s pension for the rest of their lives. Their children, should they have any, will be given the best opportunities available in the Capitol for education. For aiding the capture of ringleaders Haymitch Abernathy, Johanna Mason, or Plutarch Heavensbee, this bounty will be even higher.”

“Always comes down to just how much he can sell us victors for, doesn’t it?” Johanna remarked sarcastically. A helpless snort of laughter, tinged with their fear and anger and nervousness, rippled through the room.

“Clever fuck,” Chaff muttered angrily, leaning forward with a frown creasing his dark face.

“Nobody said he was stupid,” Haymitch observed dryly. “It would be so much easier for us if he was.”

“Oh, it’s smart,” Clover admitted. “All they have to do is sell us out and they’ve got it made. And let’s be honest, none of us belongs to our district all that closely anymore. The Games made damn sure of that.” Chantilly couldn’t fully relate to the bitterness in her voice. She’d belonged to the Academy and then the Square, a steady gap between her and the rest of One, ever since she was a child. There hadn’t been that sudden rupture in her life like the dark horse victors experienced.

“I don’t know about _you_ lot,” Brutus interjected, “but in Two we respect our victors.”

“We also respect the Capitol,” Lyme told him flatly, “and plenty of people in Two would now sell you to Snow out of a sense of duty, never mind the bounty. Although for the quarry workers, it’s gotta be enticing. As for Enobaria, that’s just how much the Capitol respects us, Brute.” 

Brutus sat back, looking profoundly uncomfortable, little growls of words Chantilly couldn’t quite make out passing his lips, but he sat there nonetheless.

Onscreen, Snow continued, “As for Miss Mason’s broadcast, her supposed words about truth and justice? Her actions speak for themselves. She’s been closely involved with numerous Capitol citizens over the years, distanced herself from her birth district. Her petty hurts at now having to endure risk and discomfort for our nation’s continued safety, just as you all have endured so patiently for so many years, are making her lash out, say anything, tell any lie to trick you into fighting for—what? Will you fight simply for the foolish words of a disgruntled, unscrupulous, promiscuous young woman trying to paint herself as _one of you_? They previously tried to get you to fight on behalf of a silly seventeen-year-old girl in love with a boy. This is how desperate they are in trying repeatedly to goad you into folly.”

“Oh look everyone, Johanna’s just a bitter and angry slut,” Johanna mocked, though Chantilly heard the wavering of shame beneath the rage.

“Treason cannot be tolerated, for the safety of our nation. Until I have the leaders of this insurrection in hand to face justice, those who have harbored them, hidden them, and refused to do their duty as citizens by reporting that treason will now pay for their complicity as traitors themselves.”

Twelve popped up first, the seal on the Justice Building in the background clearly seen, and there was also the view of the central square. It had been decades since her Victory Tour, but those grey cobblestones had looked like they had coal dust wedged in between them in stark black lines, which was oddly attractive in such a depressing, downtrodden place. But seven people were down on their knees on the stage in front of the Justice Building—five oddly fair, golden-haired figures surrounded by the silent sea of black-haired miners, and then one dark-haired woman about Chantilly’s age and a dark-haired man—barely more than a boy—at the end next to her. She thought she recognized some of them from last year’s Final Eight interviews, but couldn’t place whether they were Katniss or Peeta’s family. Once Glimmer and Marvel were out, she’d casually paid attention in hopes that Haymitch might pull out a win for once, but not that close.

Right now, whichever of Twelve’s victors they belonged to, seven Peacekeepers stood behind them, with pistols in hand pointed directly at the backs of their skulls. “Haymitch?” Johanna questioned.

Haymitch stared, and she saw something die in his expression, his skin going pale. “That’s Katniss’ ma Perulla. Her— _cousin_ Gale Hawthorne,” she noticed he hesitated a moment there, “and his ma Hazelle,” even more hesitation there, and his voice suddenly hit a rush as if he had to hurry to make it through, “then that’s the mayor’s wife Maribelle Undersee, Peeta’s ma and pa, Liam and Jinny, and his oldest brother—Farl.”

The names stuck in her ears. Farl. Hazelle. Jinny. Perulla. They had names now, as they stared out into the distance, waiting to die. The blond boy just looked terrified and confused. The dark-haired boy—Gale—glowered defiantly. Perulla Everdeen looked strangely calm and turned and said something to the man next to her, Peeta’s father Liam. Hazelle Hawthorn’s gaze was distant, as if looking at something well beyond the crowd gathered to watch her die.

Then the Twelve screen reduced, turned into a tiny screen in the lower right of the screen. The next scene flickered into view—Eleven—a woman, an older man, a boy of about the age of Gale and Peeta’s brothers, a pair of women around thirty, a man and a woman around forty. Chaff actually screamed, a sound of anguish that chilled her to the bone, and it died down to a low, sobbing moan punctuated by muffled, broken sounds of _Zee_ and _Rabe_ as Chaff covered his eyes with his single hand, obviously unable to watch.

The others came swiftly, and the cries of terror sounded as they moved down through each district, even those without victors sitting at that table: Twelve, Eleven, Nine, Eight, Seven, Five, Four, Three, Two. Each screen reduced to a tiny tile and the next grim lineup came along. Every time, those somehow connected to victors were on stage, ready to die. By the time they got to One, it was a foregone conclusion, but in no way was she ready for it. 

She’d been the last hope for children for her parents after their three other babies died so young. But they hadn’t had her for long. She aced the assessment testing at age six, and nobody in One could turn down an invitation to the Academy. Besides, she’d been so glad to get them out of the silver mines, where One’s poorest died young, and help them move up the ladder of One’s social standing, but her entire childhood devoted to the program was the price for that. By the time she went into the arena at seventeen, it wasn’t the same as the dark horse districts. Her parents didn’t get back someone changed, because they barely knew her by them. They would always be grateful, and they always had adored the yearly visits she made with Donny and Trina and to make sure they were comfortable in their old age. But Jasper and Sable and the rest of the Square were far more family to Donny and Trina by this point than Argent and Garnet Dumas.

But there they were now, her aged parents, two dark-skinned miners kneeling on the stage, obviously stiff with painful joints from the long years in the damp mines. From the way her mother’s eyes didn’t quite focus, she’d finally finished going totally blind in the nine months since Chantilly had seen her. Was it worse for her to not see it coming? She saw her father holding her mother’s hand and she thought again of Niello, aching and afraid for him.

Niel’s parents, even older and more stooped, were there too, along with his older brother Tyrian and his family. Cashmere and Gloss’ parents—and apparently they had a younger sister as well, she’d never known that because nobody spoke about their birth family in the Square, the victors were the only family that mattered—were still bright gold next to the silver of her parents and Niello’s. 

“Looks like Haymitch and Johanna are the only ones here with no family left to kill—and look who dragged us into this mess,” Cashmere noted snidely, though Chantilly heard that her voice trembled. 

She saw Haymitch flinched as if Cashmere had struck him. Johanna didn’t have a smart remark either, saying only in a dull voice, “Those are my old friends Rhus, Bud, and Acacia up there, Cash. So do us a favor and shut the hell up.”

Haymitch’s voice was equally flat. “Hazelle’s the sister of Briar—my girl when I was a tribute.” Nobody had to ask more about that. They’d all heard about the girl that Snow killed. That made looking at the defiantly angry boy all the more horrible; that kid could easily have been Haymitch’s nephew. “Maribelle’s the twin sister of the girl I had an alliance with in the arena,” Haymitch confirmed. It was so long ago, but Chantilly had watched those Games closely, especially since Sapphire had come so close to winning. She vaguely remembered the pretty, blond girl from Twelve, who looked almost like she could have been from One’s artisans. Remembered too seeing the skinny, dark, small Twelve boy holding her hand as she died, his face twisted with sorrow, and thinking that with how the girl was the one strong enough to do what was necessary and break the alliance, and now wearing his outrage and grief as obvious as an armband, he was too soft to make it all the way. Apparently even she’d underestimated Haymitch. “Guess he’s leaving her husband Jarron alive because killing the mayor is too much trouble,” Haymitch observed darkly.

She reached over and took Cashmere’s hand, half-expecting the gesture to be rejected, but instead the younger woman clutched her tightly. Looking over, she saw the tears gathering in Cashmere’s eyes, grief and shame and anger all rolled into one. All those painful lessons in poise and public composure, years and years of criticisms and punishments if need be to make them absolutely perfect, and it all crumbled and fell right now.

The Academy said that blood relatives didn’t matter to those who ascended to something higher, to the arena, to victory. Oh, how they mattered, and she hadn’t known just how much until right now. She might lose Niel too—and where were her babies? It opened a whole new pit of dread for her…was Snow going to kill them too? She sat, paralyzed, unable to move, unable to look away, screaming inside. She’d heard what Snow did to Haymitch, and to Johanna, but here it was, multiplied and broadcast for the entire nation to see rather than a cold, frightening secret. No secrets, no hidden chain of threats, just cold, brutal executions for all to see and to inspire naked terror, because on the brink of open war, Snow had nothing left to lose.

She didn’t look away because she wouldn’t fail her mother and father like that, in this last moment, even as she silently begged them to forgive her. She’d cost them in the end.

Just then, Snow’s voice coolly said, “Fire,” and simultaneously on the twelve tiny screens, the crack of pistol shot rang out and everywhere, bodies crumpled like rag dolls.


	10. Chapter 10

They all sat there, stunned. Snow didn’t bother with a closing announcement, or a repeat of the anthem. The images onscreen spoke loud and clear. Haymitch heard the sound of someone weeping. Chaff was chanting _No no nonononono_ under his breath as if the drone of it would somehow shut out the reality. When he dared turn and look, he saw Chaff’s gritted teeth, Brutus in wide-eyed shock, Clover and Blight clutching each other. Beetee and Wiress looked at the screen, discussing lowly whether they thought it could have been faked or not, but they must have known the truth. Annie sat there with her eyes screwed tightly shut and her hands clapped over her ears, rocking back and forth as she likely tried to scrub the images from her mind. Except that had been no hallucination. Five minutes after Snow told her that her lover was dead in the arena, he’d wiped out her family, Finnick’s, Annie’s, Carrick’s. Gone through and murdered people related to over forty victors, as coolly as crushing a swarm of insects. 

At least he hadn’t had to watch his family die, and not on national television, though that seemed like a tiny saving grace at this point. Terrible enough to watch Hazelle Hawthorne and Maribelle Undersee die—Maribelle was Maysilee’s identical twin, bad enough that he couldn’t even look at her for years after the Second Quell. As for Hazelle, she was close enough to Briar’s twin with the same wavy black hair, the same heart-shaped face and slightly cleft chin, and every time he’d looked at her cleaning his house it twisted at his heart to wonder if that was how Briar would have looked in middle age.

It was like watching Maysilee and Briar die all over again, as grown women rather than the girls of a lost, long-ago summer. Deep in what black and twisted wreckage passed for his soul, he was certain that was exactly why Snow had done it. He looked over at Johanna, seeing her dull expression. She’d just watched three of her childhood friends murdered up there on that Seven stage in a public spectacle. He’d forgotten that lesson Snow taught him as a seventeen-year-old child, when he’d given Haymitch that pompous speech in the rose gardens about how he’d be sold off to the highest bidder. _There are others. You’ll learn obedience, Haymitch, at whatever cost you choose. If you refuse, I turn first to the sisters of your two ladies. Maribelle Donner and Hazelle Wainwright. I can have them killed. I can have them tortured. I can have them turned into Avoxes. I can have them reaped._ Twenty-five years of obedience and finally becoming worthless even as a whore made him think that threat was blunted. Snow apparently hadn’t felt the same.

He’d lied to them to keep the secret, pushed them away and kept his distance, submitted to any shameful, sick, depraved thing demanded of him, for years and years, all to keep them safe. Once again, he’d stepped over the line, and Coriolanus Snow proved that previous good behavior meant nothing. He’d have to give Peeta the bad news himself. _Sorry Katniss is dead. By the way, this little rebellion means your parents and your brothers…_ His brow furrowed as he brought himself up short. Two Mellark brothers, as he remembered. The older had died. But the younger—Bannick, that was the name. Where had he been? Had Haymitch missed him, focused on Maribelle and Hazelle as he’d been? But for that matter, where was Maribelle’s daughter?

He wasn’t the only one realizing it, by the sound of things. “Where are the kids?” Clover said, her golden brown eyes wide, clutching at Blight’s arm. “My sister and her husband were on that stage, but _where are their kids?_ ”

“No children, not like the Games,” Wiress piped up, eyeing the screen in confusion.

“Did anyone,” Lyme said slowly, “know of anyone under eighteen that just got ex—“ Her words cut off in a strangled noise. “Anyone under eighteen?” she repeated herself.

“Gale Hawthorne was nineteen,” he said slowly, shaking his head. “Farl Mellark was…what, twenty-one?” Chaff’s son Rabe had been twenty, but his daughters Chardy and Farrow—had they been there?

“He’s got the kids,” Chantilly said, her voice barely above a whisper, covering her eyes. “The reaping age ones, I’m sure, and he probably took the littles as well.” He thought of the

“What’s he going to do with a bunch of six year olds?” Brutus ventured in confusion.

“Kill them, whore them out, use them as leverage, what the fuck do you _think_?” Clover snarled at him. “Whatever he wants!”

“It’s not like you have a child in there like Chantilly or me,” Chaff ventured in confusion. “I mean, yeah, you’re upset about your nieces and nephews or whatever, but…I’m sorry, _I just watched my firstborn and my wife get their brains blown out._ ” His second wife—Zinnia—his first wife Tansy had died of fever just before the 53rd Games. Snow had denied shipment of the medicine that could have saved her, probably to prove the point to Chaff of who was in control. They’d gotten pickled as anything that Games in the Eleven apartment, and Haymitch let Chaff drunkenly ramble to him about the young bride he’d been husband to for barely eight months, knowing that night that he’d go be fucked by another Capitolite, knowing that the only hands that would ever touch him would be like that. And in that moment he’d been so damn glad that he never would marry, that he’d never be a real man rather than a whore, because no Twelve woman would ever want to touch him now anyway, and he couldn’t let Snow kill a woman he loved just to prove a point. He also couldn’t betray Briar, and the fact that she’d died for his sake, by so easily replacing her. Chaff had remarried by the next Games. Haymitch envied him that, secretly, in spite of all his rationale, even as he thought Chaff was being a fool with that kind of risk. Twenty-one years later, he wasn’t happy to be proved right again. 

“ _Not the time_ , Chaff,” Chantilly said between her teeth.

“It was daylight, not dark in any of the districts,” Johanna said slowly. “And he said people would be curious about the…events in their districts. They’ve been dead for hours.”

“The tape was likely edited together from twelve separate tapes, with Snow pretending to give the…final order to make it look simultaneous,” Beetee said. “I saw some remnants. It was a hasty job.”

“He had this all planned and taped and edited, even while we were on our way here,” Haymitch had to admit it. Even as they were planning what to do, how Johanna might step into the shoes Katniss left behind, Snow had already struck the first blow. Long before their tape had tried to reach them, urge them to fight back, they’d been put to the screws and seen how serious Snow was about this, how much terror and blood he’d bring them. 

Now Coin finally stirred, her brisk tones puncturing into the conversation, needle-sharp. He hadn’t forgotten she was there—it was difficult for him to not be at least somewhat aware of everyone around him, trying to instantly assess their potential risk. That was one of the few benefits to solitude. “So it appears he’s struck first.” She looked at the other victors. “I’m sorry for your losses. You must be exhausted and it’s getting late. We’ll let you go to your rooms for the evening and begin to acclimate.”

Haymitch fully recognized the sound of people being dismissed. Coin consulted a datapad in front of her. “Dumas, you’re with Anden—“

“No, _I’m_ rooming with my wife,” Blight said crossly, moving closer to Clover, who put an equally possessive arm around his shoulders. 

Coin looked at them, brow furrowed in confusion. “You’re married? I wasn’t aware of a—“

“You think the Capitol would give us permission?” Clover shot back sharply, still looking on the verge of tears. Her nephews—he’d heard her mention a niece as well. They’d always seemed close, probably because both she and Blight knew they couldn’t risk having kids. “You can put us together now or you can go to the bother of moving us first thing in the morning once we sign whatever papers you want. Your choice.”

To his surprise, Coin seemed to acquiesce to that readily. “You can sign the marriage paperwork first thing tomorrow morning and move into a childless-married compartment tonight,” she agreed, fingers flying over the datapad again. 

“We’re not childless,” Blight argued. “We have our little girl, and dammit, wherever Snow’s put her, we’re getting her back, and her cousins too.” 

Haymitch stared at them. The niece—how old? Five, six? She was actually Clover and Blight’s? Clever bastards, hiding her like that, keeping attention off of her. But to actually give their child to Clover’s sister to raise—the sister who’d just been executed—no wonder they were frantic. 

“Uh…” Brutus started. All right, so he wasn’t the only confused one.

“Not now,” Chantilly said sharply. From the protective look on her face as she looked at Clover, she’d known for years. He tried to not feel stupidly hurt that three of his longest-term friends kept that secret from him—the one who’d never been a husband, never been a father.

“Please understand that with space at a premium, and no special privileges, I can’t deal with the issue of children who aren’t here right now to require housing,” Coin replied, clicking a few more times on her datapad. “We’ll address it when the issue arises. Very well. The two Arnessons, together. The rest of you will be in singles quarters. Dumas, you’ll be put with Donovan. Abernathy, with McCormick.” He glanced over at Chaff, still looking like he’d been punched in the face repeatedly, not looking at the rest of them. “Rathbone, with Parker. Mason, with Cresta.” Johanna muttered something at that. “Latier, with Allemand. Heavensbee, with Trinian,” whoever the hell that was.

“I had thought—“ Plutarch tried to interject, head jerking up abruptly as he startled at the words.

“You’re not a Head Gamemaker here, Heavensbee, with unfair Capitol privileges,” Coin informed him coolly, obviously anticipating his protest and shutting it down. “You’re an ordinary citizen again.” Plutarch sighed lowly and nodded. 

Odd how accommodating she’d been about Blight and Clover, not what he’d have expected from her iron-hard mien. But maybe he’d been around Coriolanus Snow too damn long and it made him paranoid about those holding leadership. Maybe she was an utterly fair pain in the ass, but still a woman who might have a small bit of compassion.

“Give me a minute with them before they go,” he told Coin. She acknowledged that with a small nod. “ _Alone_ ,” he emphasized. Her mouth went into a tight, thin line, but she gestured to the other Thirteen staff in the room, pointing them out the door.

“Make it quick,” she told him. “We’ve got a lot of work ahead.” He nodded in return.

“You too, Plutarch,” he said, seeing the Gamemaker made no effort to rise. No, this was going to be a victors-only meeting. Plutarch’s eyebrows rose, but to his credit, he didn’t object, slipping out the door behind the others. 

As the door shut with the usual _whoosh_ , he looked at them sitting there around the table. Beaten, weary, devastated now. They’d all just taken a crushing blow. Wiress and Beetee busily sketched something, almost obsessively trying to get lost in whatever project. Cashmere looked like she didn’t know whether to cry or kill. Blight and Clover clutched each other’s hands, murmuring low words to each other. Brutus looked awkward and angry, while Lyme kept glancing at him with a look of concern. Chantilly and Annie and Chaff looked at him out of haunted eyes, and he knew he’d never forget that look as he’d seen it in the mirror so many times when he was a teenager. Johanna was the only one who could meet his eyes, and in them he found a twin of his own shock, anger, and resolve. He used to keep himself going.

“I only asked you to agree to the alliance to take down the arena,” and he didn’t—couldn’t—mention the painful agreement to keep Katniss and Peeta alive, “so I can’t tell any of you what to do now.”

“Well, that’s a first,” Johanna said calmly, her brown eyes narrowing in thought, “given we’ve spent most of our lives being told _exactly_ what to do by the Capitol.”

Haymitch nodded at that, took in a deep breath, braced himself for the plunge. “You can join this rebellion, see how far we can take it; you can go home to—go home,” he caught himself from instinctively mentioning their families, “assuming our new ally will provide the hovercraft for it. If you play your cards right, Snow may believe you just got dragged into this and take the price off your head.”

“Bad lies are like rotten meat,” Wiress pointed out calmly. “Smelled from far away.” 

“She’s right,” Beetee added. “Snow won’t believe that she and I weren’t involved.” 

“Fine,” he replied, acknowledging the truth of that. Those two were stuck, given their role in taking down the forcefield. “But for the rest of you…I’d ask you, if I can ask you one more thing, that you stay neutral rather than telling Snow where we are now.”

“Who the fuck do you think we are—?“ Lyme interjected angrily.

He tried to not look at Cashmere and Brutus, the two weak links, the ones dragged into it by happenstance without a choice. He didn’t want to be the one to accuse, to exclude them, to start the fracturing of the victors. He’d told Johanna and Finnick once, years ago, that victors didn’t hurt their own, because they already had enough people that tried to fuck them over. That was true during the Games, but everything had changed now. Personal loyalties and sentiments and agendas, as he’d told Johanna on the hovercraft, might now well count for far more than that shared title. It hurt to think of things that way, and to wonder whether some of the only people he felt he could trust might be the ones to betray him now. “I think you’re all people who just took one of the worst hits a person can. I’d point out that it was Snow’s doing, but in the end…what you do is your choice. Thing is, whatever you do from here on in, remember that we’re victors—your life ain’t just your own—it was paid for, and it came at damn high cost.”

He told them, “Eleven kids’ lives were what bought Peeta Mellark’s ticket out of that arena alive last year. The rest of you, it was twenty-three.” A slight, self-deprecating smile, twisted with regret, as he said, “And well, me, I beat you all, ‘cause I’ve got making the cost of _forty-seven_ dead kids worth my life riding on me.” He’d fucked that up for far too long. “That price just got higher besides. Now we’ve all lost people we loved. Whatever you do now…we should make that count.”

“I wouldn’t say you’ve practiced what you’re preaching?” Annie said, finally stirring herself, and it was an unexpected attack from her. But then, she’d just lost her boyfriend, her adopted grandma, and her blood kin, all in one fell swoop. It had been a shitty few days for her without question. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to take a swipe at someone for it. But Mags and Finnick, at least, had made their own choices. 

He saw Johanna bristling at that and hurried to speak up before she could erupt. “No. I haven’t. I didn’t have the choice then of how to live my life. But I do now. And I won’t forget what I owe, to any of you, or the dead.” He looked at them. “That’s all,” he concluded. He didn’t have stirring words and banner waving for them. It would have felt trite and fake. Beetee, closest to the door, went to fetch Coin. 

Within a few minutes Coin had summoned more of her minions and had them guide the other victors away, presumably to their quarters. Plutarch took a seat again. The fatigue gnawed at Haymitch, and the increasing aches and discomfort from the withdrawal—his skin felt like it was burning. He felt like he could drop into that bunk and sleep for twenty hours, except the nightmares and pain would probably wake him in the middle of the night. It felt like all he could do right now to stay awake and focus.

Finally Coin cocked an eyebrow and glanced over at Plutarch. “Heavensbee?” She looked at Haymitch next. “Abernathy?” To Johanna lastly. “And how about you, _Phoenix?_ ”Her tone and her gaze said _We fix this. Now._

“Well, he’s certainly tried to rake you over the coals,” Plutarch said with an apologetic glance at Johanna. “We need to counter that, and fight his message about putting a price on all our heads.”

“We need,” Johanna said sourly, “to actually do something rather than just talk on and on. Snow _acted_.” He listened to the two of them bickering about it and rested his forehead in his hands, wiping the sweat away with his sleeve, suddenly freezing, his head pounding. His stomach had the sensation of contracting into a tight ball, and with dread he felt.

“Abernathy?” Coin said, prompting him. 

“Bathroom?” he choked. Johanna thought fast and kicked him a wastebasket just in time. He had about a half-second to note that the only thing in it seemed to be a couple of ridiculously tiny pencil nubs about an inch long—none of the usual shit that would have filled the wastebaskets in a Capitol home or Mentor Central, like disposable coffee cups or wads of paper.

By the time Coin called someone from the sanitation crew and he handed over the sharp-smelling wastebasket, avoiding their eyes in embarrassment, the last heaves had long passed. Though he was sweating again, wanting nothing more than another shower. 

“Alcohol withdrawal, I assume.” It wasn’t a question coming from Coin. “You’ve been made aware we allow no intoxicating—“

“I’m well aware,” he cut her off, not wanting to hear the whole lecture, not really able to endure it right then. If they prohibited alcohol, even a black market still, obviously they weren’t going to look favorably upon an old drunk like him.

“You’ll have to be put into medical isolation until your symptoms entirely subside and you recover from them.”

“That’ll take a couple weeks,” he argued, voice still raspy from the strain of throwing up. He’d endured it when Peeta dumped the liquor supply and it was sheer hell. The thought of being once again left alone to sweat it out, groaning in agony at the pain wracking his entire body, screaming at things that weren’t there, wishing he could just die, made him start to shake, and he wanted to look away before his damn useless brain started seeing things from sheer terror. Instead he forced himself to look at the three of them, striving to seem as composed as he possibly could—for a man who’d just puked out what little dinner he’d had, nauseous as he’d been at the table. He’d shoved Johanna some of his leftovers. 

Coin looked at Plutarch, inclining her head in an unspoken question. “He was instrumental in getting us this far,” Plutarch acknowledged. Well, goodie for Plutarch in giving him some actual credit. Haymitch tried to stuff down the sudden surge of temper at that—what the hell was wrong with him? He hadn’t felt like this even during the misery of withdrawal last time.

“How useful will he be in the future?” she asked.

Obviously he and Johanna weren’t invited into the conversation. But in typical fashion, Johanna charged her way right in. “I need him,” she said to Coin in a tone that would brook no argument. “And you do too.”

 _I need him_. He might have smiled at that, even barked sharply in irritation as it had been, if Johanna wouldn’t have likely taken it for mockery. Couldn’t help but be grateful that she’d decided to take up for him, for whatever reason. It felt funny, though. He hadn’t expected that, and it left him questioning just why she’d done it, and the uncomfortable weight of owing her something indefinable settled on him too.

Coin and Johanna stared at each other. Stubborn ass, she’d shoot herself in the foot to prove a damn point rather than be willing to back down for a better, long-term strategy. “Is this one of your conditions?” Coin asked her quietly.

“Yes,” Johanna said. “So you give him whatever drugs he needs to keep going.”

He wanted to tell her to not burn whatever leverage she could get from Coin for his sake. He readily sensed they’d get precious few cards to play with from this woman. But if he tried to bicker with her right there she’d just dig in her heels even more stubbornly. He’d tell her later to back off, and the stupid, soft part of him wanted it to stop hurting enough that if he could just get through tonight…maybe that would be enough.

“So what do you plan to do, Mason?” Coin asked again.

“Find me somewhere to go and _do something_. I’m tired of trading words with an asshole who twists the truth. Send me in with some troops,” Johanna said, leaning over the table, eyes flashing fiercely. “We get it on camera that we’ve taken a district from the Capitol...people see it can be done…that’s the first shots fired. They’ll believe I give a shit about them being free if I prove it rather than just telling them to do it and show up late for a teary camera op to cry over their dead. Talk is cheap.”

Coin sat back in her chair, hands resting on the table. She didn’t rub her chin or fuss with her hair as she pondered. “Heavensbee, Abernathy?” 

“Most of the districts are so spread out,” he began tiredly, forcing himself to think. That helped—gave him a focus rather than his own discomfort, a spur to keep going. “The only two that are really centralized in population are Eight and Twelve—most of Six, come to think of it.”

“Eight and Twelve are heavily fortified and low-priority production,” Coin said crisply, shaking her head. He fought another wave of anger at Twelve being so easily dismissed again, by yet another person. _Not strategic._ Never mind how badly they’d suffered over the last months. The stink of blackened, rotting flesh hanging from a noose in summer heat, because Thread insisted on leaving the corpses up there until the _next_ hanging, wouldn’t leave his nostrils anytime soon. “As for Six, it’s a strategic target, but it’s isolated and on the west coast, past the Capitol. The Capitol could easily isolate our troops and destroy them before we can send in reinforcements.” Wryly, he had to acknowledge the Capitol had done itself smart in making Three, Five, and Six, the essential districts for transport, power, and communications in the far west, protected by the mountains and the Capitol. Nobody would be able to easily take any of them from the air without the Capitol knowing they were there by passing too close to Capitol radar.

“Can’t go with Seven,” Plutarch chimed in. “It would look too much like favoritism, right when Johanna needs to promote herself as having wider concerns.”

“I have wider concerns,” Johanna said dryly. “What friends I’ve got are from other districts. I don’t have anyone _left_ in Seven.” Sitting close to her as he was, he heard her mutter what sounded like _You condescending prick_ under her breath.

“The inner six will be more heavily fortified as they’re closer to the Capitol—Three, Five, and Six will be particularly tough as they’re west of the Capitol.” He thought on it more. “Of the outer six, you’ve got Seven, Nine, Eleven, and Twelve represented here already by victors, and you’ve jettisoned the possibility of Eight. That leaves you Ten, doesn’t it?”

“It’s so spread out, Haymitch,” Plutarch argued. “It’s dozens of collectives and farms thrown scattershot across one of Panem’s largest districts.”

“It’s also got some of the best recruits you might get in winning their own freedom. Even the chicken farmers have to know how to handle a knife. The southerners,” so Angus had told him long ago, “even have to have firearms out riding the cattle and sheep drives to fight off mutts out in the wild.” He’d long thought that if any other district would have managed to turn Career because of their skills, it would have been Ten, and given how the Capitol romanticized Ten as a bunch of rough and ready cowboys. “Get them on your side, secure Ten, and you’ve got some soldiers who may help you win other districts, plus you control the meat supply. The Capitol’s spoiled. They’re used to meat three times a day. It’ll be a loss to them to tighten their belts, and they won’t have planned for that. It’ll also be an incentive to other districts—we can supply them with better food than they’ve ever had in their lives.” 

Plutarch wouldn’t know that, but Johanna did, from the look of understanding on her face. She’d told him that in Seven that rabbit or squirrel made its way into the summer stewpots sometimes, but winter rations were much like the usual Twelve diet: a bit of the cheapest meat at the butcher’s a couple of times a week. The idea of eating meat daily—and most of them had likely never tasted beef in their lives—would be a thing of wonderment to them.

He could see it coming together in his head. “Start in the south— _away_ from the district center up north. The Peacekeepers will expect it less. Get the cattle farmers on your side by taking the farm—farms?” He looked at Plutarch, uncertain. He’d only ever seen the district center in Ten, on two Victory Tours, and he didn’t trust the bullshit movies like _A Farmhand’s Heart_ and Splendor On the Range the Capitol put on TV.

“It’s a single large ranch,” Plutarch confirmed. “Southlands Station.” 

“Take that by surprise,” he insisted. “They’ll have horses and they can get more rifles than what you send, and they’ll be skilled with both. You can more quickly sweep north from there and just start raiding the hell out of the other farms along the way. Broadcast a message at the same time that Ten’s started fighting, show some footage, and chances are other farms will start fighting back if they can. Maybe other districts too while they’re at it.”

Coin stared at him with something like actual interest now. “Maybe you do have something to offer. It’s either insanity or genius—most people would suggest capturing the district center first to secure it.”

“Most people didn’t survive the Second Quell by saying ‘fuck the rules’ either,” he told her with a sarcastic smile. He almost said, _Or save two tributes in one Games_ , but at the reminder of Katniss, the words stuck in his throat.

“Fine. You’ll both leave at 0700 tomorrow,” Coin said. She couldn’t possibly mean…she must have seen the look on his face because she clarified, “Your plan, Abernathy, so you get to go help see it implemented.” She nodded to Johanna. “Besides, she claimed she needed you in this.”

“That wasn’t quite what I said,” Johanna muttered. “But fine.”

He tried to not keep staring at her. Just like that, she’d ordered him what to do. For his telling the other victors they had a choice, seemed like his had just been yanked away again. Not that he was unhappy to go make sure Johanna didn’t do anything too damn reckless, but leaving the others behind, right now with their losses so raw, sat will with him. Peeta, pale and in pain, came to mind in particular. He’d have to abandon the boy now, just when Haymitch ought to be there for him the most? It wasn’t so long that he didn’t clearly recall what it was like having nobody, right when he’d lost everything and everyone. Peeta had just lost his girl and his family. But if this war failed, Peeta’s neck would be in a noose anyway.  
“Both of you report to the infirmary first to get checked over before you report to your quarters. Any medications you need will be carried by an approved Thirteen medic.” Coin glanced at them one last time. “You’ll wear a tracking anklet at all times with a distress mode so that you can be picked up quickly in an emergency. You have a week and a half, maybe two weeks at most. At that point, you’re being pulled out and brought back here, regardless of the mission’s success or failure.”

“Oh, I’m sure it won’t take Snow long to set up traps,” Johanna said. “So limited time probably sounds good. We’ll stay on the move as quickly as we can.”

“If you can’t capture the station within twenty-four hours and get out of there, you’ll be pulled out immediately.” Considering Snow could have bombers there in a hurry, Haymitch couldn’t argue with that rationale. “I’d suggest you not fail, though, because it would be a large loss of face. I’d also suggest you not get captured, because once you’re in the grasp of the Capitol it becomes much more difficult to retrieve you.”

“We get it,” Johanna acknowledged impatiently. 

“No wishes for luck?” he drawled as they pushed up from their chairs.

“I believe in planning, not luck,” Coin replied, pushing her chair in.

 _Said like someone who never took the Games to heart._ Oh, he’d plan all right, but so much came down to chance and the ability to adapt to it, if possible. Katniss’ death had been pure bad luck. He’d met Briar and her aunt by chance out in the woods when he was little, gathering berries, and it meant Briar died eight years later.

The doctor in the infirmary, a briskly efficient man of about fifty named Harcourt, tended again to Johanna’s burns and wounds and dehydration, and then gave Haymitch several injections, mumbling words like _benzo_ and _thiamine_ and _antiemetic_. He recognized a syringe of morphling as the last one, though it was only enough to take the edge off. He still ached deep in his bones as if he’d been beaten badly a few days before. “You’ll be uncomfortable, and you’ll still sweat out some of the toxins. Drink as much water as you can stand, frequently, because dehydration is your worst enemy for the next few days.” Harcourt clucked his tongue. “To be honest, I don’t like sending you out on field maneuvers.”

“We do what we have to,” he told the man, not interested in a debate on it. “You’ll prep what I need for the medic?”

“Yes.”

“How’s Peeta?” The curtains were drawn around his bed again.

“That leg is still touch and go. There was venom in that bite and it’s causing rapid necrosis in the flesh. We might lose it yet.”

“Can I talk…” He gestured to the curtain. 

“He’s in chemically-induced sleep,” Harcourt replied, shaking his head. “It’s really the best thing for him right now because the pain is that bad. Should I tell him you came by?”

A hundred things he ought to say to Peeta crowded his mind, but he didn’t want them relayed from someone else. It seemed cowardly. He just nodded in reply. “Tell him I’m sorry I had to go so soon.” That would have to do until he could do better in person. He turned to leave, his boot soles squeaking faintly against the dampness of the fresh-scrubbed floor, shiny as a mirror.

Exhausted as he was, when he entered the compartment with a swipe of the key card, being confronted with a wall of total blackness immediately pinged at that part of him that dreaded the darkness and all its potential terrors. He instinctively worried about more than banged-up shins if he walked into furniture by accident. “Chaff?” he said into the dark.

“What?” The answer finally came.

“Can you turn a damn light on?”

“There’s no light switch. They must be on a timer,” Chaff said flatly. “The ones that showed me the way here told me they’d extended our lights-out just a bit because it was so late when we got in, but it went out about ten minutes after I got here.” Haymitch could hear that thick edge to his voice and knew Chaff had been weeping. Left alone in the dark to do it—his heart twisted painfully at the thought, and he imagined the others left to do the same.

“Keep talking?” He fumbled his way ahead, carefully shuffling one foot in front of the other, guiltily thankful that he’d taken the closest bed to the door—the closest to escape. 

“About what?” Chaff’s laugh sounded shaky, on the verge of hysteria. His right leg found the bed suddenly and he bit back a curse at having kicked the iron bedframe. Working his way along the bed with his hands, he heard another strangled sound coming in the dark, and this was no danger, no murder-mutt. This was his friend, who’d just lost another wife and his firstborn, didn’t even know where his two youngest were right now and what might be done to them.

This was why he’d never risked marriage, even if sometimes he’d hungered and hurt for someone in District Twelve who could smile and be glad to see him, even if in his early years any woman in the district would have still married him—for the security if nothing else. He couldn’t bear to paint a target one anyone else’s back, couldn’t have borne crying himself sick again over and over, suddenly left utterly alone in the night.

He couldn’t comfort Peeta. He couldn’t have saved anyone. He’d still have to leave them to their grief in the morning. But as he carefully felt his way across the gap between the two beds, sitting down beside Chaff in the dark, he risked putting an arm around his old friend’s shoulders.

He’d known Chaff McCormick twenty-four years now. He’d never forget how he first realized this man was a true friend, that night with a seventeen-year-old Haymitch flying kite-high and bleeding from wounds at being made into a sexual party favor, knocking on the Eleven door in the Training Center because he’d mistaken it for Twelve. He thankfully still didn’t remember that party in anything but brief flashes tinged with neon Amp blue—the click of a wheel they’d spun for what to do to him, hands on his skin, laughing deliriously because he could smell blood and that should have made him flip out but somehow _nothing_ hurt. 

He did remember later, in a little more clarity. Still so high that the pain hadn’t fully hit, he’d sobbed in Seeder’s lap that he wanted to go home, mistaking her for his ma, and Chaff had helped get him to bed, half-carrying him. Chaff sitting there and even holding his hand as he went to sleep, because he’d been a stupid, insanely drugged-up kid and blurted he didn’t want to be left alone. 

So he stayed there and he left Chaff cry it out on his shoulder, racking ugly sobs full of horror and unbearable grief. He’d never tell anyone about it. He may have failed at so many things in life, but at least he could be enough of a friend that Chaff wouldn’t be left alone in the dark tonight with his pain.


	11. Chapter 11

In the blackness, trying to get to sleep, Johanna could hear the small noises. The hiss of the air refresher coming on again, sending another cool wave of stale air drifting down onto her; the even, deep snores of someone in the compartment next door loud enough to penetrate the thin steel wall; the occasional thump of boots and low murmur of voices out in the hallway—apparently some people weren’t sent for bedtime on a schedule like little kids. Guards? Were they being guarded and kept here?

Then there was the sound of Annie crying. Soft gasps and gulps, muffled by a hand or a blanket or a pillow, but still loud enough to be heard. Johanna lay there, not knowing what the hell to do. Comfort wasn’t exactly her strong suit, and it wasn’t like she knew Annie Cresta anyway. Johanna had only met her for a day or two at the 71st Games, though of course Annie wasn’t being forced into mentoring, before Annie abruptly got sent home for good “in the interest of her health”. Word was she’d flipped out and tried to stab her first patron. Mags, Haymitch, and Finnick sang a sweet line of bullshit about how crazy Annie apparently was to do that, and it got her off the hook, and nobody died for it. Johanna had resented Annie that. To be honest, she’d resented everything that seemingly just got handed to precious little Annie Cresta: an upbringing where she always got enough to eat, ample training before the arena, coming in with guaranteed sponsorships, her family still living, having other victors nearby who would actually bother to protect her and support her, her flipping out being sold as something turning her into a poor fragile little darling to protect rather than a vicious bitch to be loathed, a man’s deep and abiding love, and the right to escape Capitol whoring and own her own body.

That was about the best anyone who survived the arena could ever get. So it felt like Annelle Cresta had gotten everything Johanna Mason had ever wanted, and then even more, and Johanna doubted the woman fully appreciated it. But hearing Annie crying, not sure whether she tried to hide it out of shameful misery or just thinking she was stuck rooming with a mean bitch who didn’t feel anything but spite and _schadenfreude_ , she couldn’t pretend anymore and hide behind the safety of her wrath. Those sounds told her that Annie had valued all those things more than enough to break all over again at their loss, and that she didn’t even have the luxury of losing herself in the darkness within her mind.

She had no clue what the hell to do. Maybe it would just be best to ignore it and let Annie have the illusion of privacy to do her grieving. She’d wanted nothing more than the assurance that nobody would see her tears when it had been her turn. Still…she’d have paid any price for a friend at her side then, if she were honest. She only hadn’t wanted unfeeling strangers and gawkers to see her cry. 

She wasn’t Annie’s friend. But she’d loved Finnick as well, as a friend, a brother. That had to count for something. And she had to find a way to be different than the hard shell of the victor she’d become. Whoever the fuck the Phoenix was—some media construction of Plutarch’s. But the Johanna she’d been, little Hanna with her braids and her tomboy ways, the Johanna she hoped might still remain even in a few torn shreds of her soul, would have at least tried, even it was awkward. She’d at least made the attempt with Peeta, bad as she’d been at it. Maybe she’d gotten fearless enough to yell at the president with nothing left to lose, but she’d hidden from emotional risks long enough to make her a coward in a way she hadn’t been when she was younger. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered into the darkness, huddling in tighter on herself as she said it, waiting warily.

“Thanks,” there came the whisper in return, thick with exhaustion and tears.

She wasn’t sure what else to say to that. So she pulled the rough grey wool blanket up over herself again, tucking it around her shoulders, and tried to make her aching body go to sleep. The doctor told her that she might get tired or confused or forgetful more easily thanks to the lightning strike frying her brain a bit. No telling if that would clear up eventually or not. He said he’d send some low-level painkillers and burn cream with the medic to Ten, and advised her to keep hydrating to make up for what she’d lost. Worn out by her own exhaustion, trying to put away the idea that she couldn’t sleep without someone to keep watch, she finally slept, only to be abruptly jolted awake by the sudden click of the bright fluorescent light right on her face. She proved the doctor right by immediately not knowing where she was in this harsh, sterile steel room, and being ready to go on the attack, afraid the Capitol had her, until she saw Annie there and her brain finally caught up again.

The 6:30 am wakeup, apparently, and as she rubbed her eyes and brushed her teeth, she splashed water on her face. Her eyes were still dark-rimmed. A few bits of her hair here and there looked like they’d been singed short in the fire in the jungle, sticking out in wild, gnarled spikes. Her fern-like lightning burns still spread across the backs of her hands and her arms in dark, angry purple lines. Her skin still felt as though it tingled in spots, and in others, there was an odd numbness. In short, in body and mind, she was a patchwork quilt of fucked-up. And the rebellion hung its hopes on her—proved how desperate they must be.

Annie swiftly braided the straight black hair that fell midway down her back, fingers sure, and draped the braid over her shoulder. Johanna had watched Finnick tie knots with that same dexterous certainty. “You might not want to do that,” Johanna mentioned, her throat painfully dry and desperate for water.

“They told us regulations stated that our hair had to be bound back, or else we had to cut it short,” Annie said, brows puckering in a dark furrow of confusion.

“Then at least tuck the braid up,” she advised. She sighed, reluctant to say it, but not given much choice. Funny thing; a few days ago she’d have taken pleasure in rubbing Annie’s face in it. She couldn’t quite take pleasure in crushing someone who was bleeding with every step, though. “Because…with the braid down, you’re gonna remind people of Katniss Everdeen.” They shared the same black, Annie’s skin slightly darker than Haymitch and Katniss’ olive but close enough, a slender build. Annie was taller, green-eyed, and her face was rounder, but it would have been enough of an eerie ghost at first glance. “You want help with that…?” She offered awkwardly.

Annie let her carefully pin the braid up into a bun. Johanna tried to not think of her mother doing her hair—on Reaping Day when her name was called, and then for the last time that next year. Her mom’s hands had been strong, callused, able to handle an axe and saw with precision, but always gentle when Petra Mason touched her children. Well, except for when they’d earned a swat on the ass, but Johanna couldn’t begrudge her that. Her parents did their best to raise her right.

Caesar and Claudius had smarmily cooed over how “quaint a district tradition” her coronet braids were, especially during the 67th, when as a victor, apparently she ought to have already been striving to become as stylishly Capitol as possible. The morning of the 68th, she’d hacked her hair short again with scissors, a ragged mess that the prep team had screamed and then clucked over, lecturing her that they’d _said_ she ought to grow it out again. She’d ignored them that year, and the next, until they got the message: Johanna meant to keep it short.

Finnick had probably loved Annie’s hair—a dark barely rippling sheet with the sheen of blue-black silk, it was definitely her best feature. She’d never had a lover run his fingers through her hair, when it was long or short. Rapists didn’t count. Haymitch—well, she’d very clearly asked him for it, but he hadn’t exactly played the lover’s part either. He’d lingered, touched her and deliberately made certain it was pleasurable, but he hadn’t touched her with any kind of passion. As for Finnick…that hadn’t exactly been passion either. His desperate hands always went to something besides her short-cropped hair. 

Sticking the last pin in, she muttered, “Done,” feeling suddenly self-conscious.

“Thanks,” Annie said quietly.

Johanna wanted to say something then, something that might bridge that awkward gap with even a fragile single plank. “I…I have to go,” she blurted, and whether that was explanation, apology, or just trying to get the hell away before she made a total ass of herself, that wasn’t clear. It might well have been all three. “But I’ll be back.” _Why does she care?_

“Best of luck to you,” Annie replied, though there was an absent tone to it that told Johanna she was already caught up in her own mind. Not that Johanna could blame her on that. She hesitated for a moment, the desire to say or do more ripping into her like a jagged blade—and when had she suddenly gotten so indecisive anyway? But she’d said it right. She had to go. The best thing she could manage right now was trying to go do some good for everyone and get the war going before Snow strangled it. 

Everyone else in Thirteen apparently went to breakfast at that time, since as she passed by the cafeteria she saw them flooding in, going through the chow line in a steady stream. But Coin had made it plenty clear when they were expected at the hovercraft, and she’d already gotten the lecture on not removing food from the “designated eating areas”. So apparently even trying to barge in and hurriedly wheedle the cooks for an apple for the road wasn’t going to happen.

Then again, given how they’d looked at her and her figure—had that been only yesterday?—they’d probably decided she could skip a few meals with impunity. Directed through the twists and turns and level changes she’d been through yesterday, eventually she emerged into the hangar bay. The hovercraft waited there. From the pristine hull, either it wasn’t the same one they’d arrived in yesterday, or the mechanics here had done a patch job with record speed. But she noticed it was painted with the usual Capitol insignia on the wings and near the pilot’s cockpit—smart move.

Haymitch apparently noticed that as well; she saw him standing there, arms folded, regarding it and nodding slightly. “So they listened to Wiress and did the paint job,” he said when she came up. “It’ll only work for so long, but that’ll give us an edge until then.”

“Wiress said that?” Johanna asked, striving to remember. It felt like most of yesterday had shifted into a blur. Back beyond that, even—aside from a few star-bright clear pinpoints of memory, it was all indistinct for days and days. She could remember Katniss lying on the ground, eyes as wide open as her torn throat; Finnick falling backwards while bleeding; fighting Cashmere and Gloss; the bright flash of the lightning.

“Yeah, she said…” Haymitch shook his head then. “Never mind.” He looked over at her, looking like he hadn’t slept at all last night. The bruise-purple smears of fatigue beneath his eyes had expanded, if anything. She suspected he’d showered again this morning, or at least washed up—that neutral, unscented soap left people smelling like nothing. As she stared at him, things blurred a little, as if she’d crossed her eyes by focusing too hard. When she blinked, it went back to normal. 

“Well, let’s do this thing.” With that she headed for the gangplank. Within minutes, they were in the air again. Alongside herself and Haymitch, they’d sent a hundred Thirteen soldiers. One of them, the woman in charge, had the sharp, fatless Thirteen features, but against her drab dark grey uniform and snow-white skin, those large dark eyes and wide, red-lipped mouth looked almost frankly sensual. But for all that, Captain Ardelia Jackson was as no-nonsense as her grey uniform.

All of them, Haymitch and herself included, sat there wearing the Thirteen clothing described as “field fatigues” to her. All the rest of them had rifles secured in racks behind their seats. One of them gave them a slight smile of greeting as she and Haymitch took their places in the two unclaimed seats, both with a rifle as well. He was a man of about Haymitch’s age with skin the warm color of aged ivory that had obviously paled from lack of sunlight, but still had a weathered look and crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and mouth, as if he’d been a man with the twin habits of squinting into bright sun and smiling broadly.

“Soldier Sayers,” Jackson said, “came to us from District Ten about ten years ago. He’s from the south district, isn’t that correct?” 

She’d have guessed that even without the hint. The skin, which might have been a deeper olive than Haymitch’s years ago, the dark brown hair, and the blue eyes. 

“Dalton Sayers,” he introduced himself to her and Haymitch. She appreciated that little courtesy. Some of the others looked surprised at it. “And yeah, I came from Southlands long ago. So I know how things work around there.”

“Probably better than Angus Wahlstrom did,” Haymitch said quietly. “When he left the south district, he was only seventeen. So, tell us about things.” 

“Right now, I imagine Snow’s holding them over in Southlands, since they all would have been there. No cattle or sheep drives could set out during the Games. They’ll probably be gearing up to hit the trail in the next couple of days.”

“Average population there?” Haymitch asked.

“About four thousand.”

Jackson cut in before Haymitch could ask another question. “How many Peacekeepers?”

Dalton sat back and thought about it. “Probably about twenty citizens to one Peacekeeper—so about two hundred, and they’ll all be in Southlands right now too.”

Surprisingly, Haymitch seemed to take the rebuke and shrugged, folding his arms over his chest and giving Jackson an exaggerated nod. With that, Jackson kept crisply asking more questions—locations of Peacekeepers, strategic points, and the like.

“Very well,” she said finally. “We’ll land on the outskirts of the station, and deploy in units to capture and clear each area. It’s two to one odds, soldiers, so we’ll have to make this a decisive strike.“

“You’re ignoring one important factor,” Haymitch told her calmly. “You’ve got—all right, four thousand people there, so that’s maybe a thousand to fifteen hundred adults.” He raised an eyebrow. “Get it started, they’ll join in. They don’t want you to do it.”

Jackson started at him with a look of faint confusion. Johanna understood, though. “They’ll need your help,” she explained. “But they’ll want to fight,” she said. “At least, some of them will. They’ve been made powerless long enough.” To have Thirteen just waltz in as liberators and tell the natives to stay put and stay out of the way, rather than helping to win their own freedom, would be a blow to their pride. The district would never really _belong_ to them again until they’d had the chance to risk and sweat and even bleed for it. “We can maybe win the battle without them. But we need them to fight with us as equals to win the war.”

She got a rare smile from Haymitch—a small curl upward to the right side of his mouth, nothing as obvious as beaming approval or good humor, but it wasn’t his usual wry smirk. He nodded slightly to her as well. “I’m with the Phoenix,” he said simply, but his voice was clear enough, pitched to carry above the murmured conversations around them. She felt stupidly warm at that for just a moment. Maybe he was giving a bit of theatrics there for the others to see, but it felt good all the same.

“You’re not wearing your armband,” Jackson said, shaking her head. “Heavensbee informed us you’d wear a red armband as an identifier, especially for the camera crew.”

She’d seen the armband there with the bundle of fatigues, bright red fabric in a shade unlike either Six’s crimson or Two’s blood-red, sewn with a firebird rippling with scarlet, gold, and orange flames. “Yeah, let’s have me make myself a target,” she said brusquely. Right now it was in the right leg pocket of her trousers. She felt stupid at the thought of wearing it, playing dress-up for the cameras. 

“You may have a point,” Jackson acknowledged. She nodded to some of the other surrounding them. “Sayers, Leeg, Leeg, Fabray, Waumbaugh, Cho, you’re tasked to a squad with Mason and Abernathy.” With a shuffle of seats, the designated soldiers shifted to sit next to them. The two Leegs looked like identical twins, lean, golden-eyed, with short blond hair. Fabray was about fifty, built solid as an oak, his grey hair a sharp contrast to his deep ebony skin. Waumbaugh was young, looking like she’d barely left school, a riot of freckles on her cheeks, nose, forehead, and hands, but she cleaned her rifle with the ease of long familiarity. Cho, in contrast, was about Johanna’s age, nearly ten years older than Waumbaugh, but he seemed younger from his ready, almost self-conscious smile. He was a follower, Johanna would bet on it, someone who wanted to be told what to do. 

“And what are we doing?” Johanna asked, presumably while the others started clearing out Peacekeepers in various spots around Southlands.

Haymitch grinned wolfishly at that. “We go stir some shit up with the locals, darlin’, and we get them to join the fray.”

“I’d advise going to the slaughterhouse,” Dalton said. “It’ll have hundreds of people hard at work to finish up a huge load of cattle and sheep that the roundup will have driven down on their way back to Southlands for the Games. Plus it’ll have a lot of knives available, chains, hooks—lots of ready weapons.”

“Peacekeepers?” Haymitch asked.

“Only about a dozen, actually, and they’ll be in a security cam area near the front entrance. They’re almost never on the work floor—the sanitation risk. So they use the cameras instead to make sure people aren’t poisoning the meat or the like, and the tools are always checked in and out and inventoried every single day.” 

“If we can catch them by surprise, one grenade will take that security cam area out,” First Leeg, the one with a scar on her chin, suggested cheerfully.

She let them discuss it, suddenly tired, listening to the plan unfold. Suddenly, someone shook her shoulder, and she startled, instinctively lashing out and striking something as Haymitch barked, “Dammit, _don’t_ touch her!”

Seeing Cho holding his nose with blood trickling between his fingers, looking at her with startled eyes, Second Leeg said, “You weren’t answering, and he said your name something like four times.”

“I was thinking,” she growled, but that wasn’t true. There had been just a fading of everything. Not into the frightening blackness of oblivion, just—everything had become static for a little while. She looked away. What the fuck was wrong with her?

“They wanted to know,” Fabray said, “what you want the camera crew to do.”

“Follow us, don’t get in the way, and keep your head down,” she advised Cressida wryly. She’d rather have done it without the camera, but of course they needed to broadcast the damn thing. 

“You might want to check your rifle,” Waumbaugh advised them.

Johanna carefully took it down from the rack, surprised at its solid heft in her hands. “Uh…” She stared over at Haymitch, who looked equally nonplussed.

Fabray grunted at that. “They’re district, Waumbaugh. Remember, they may be victors, but even victors ain’t had cause to be allowed to handle guns. I imagine they’ve never held a rifle.”

Waumbaugh looked surprised at that, and a little embarrassed at being caught out. “That true?” she asked Johanna.

“Yep.” Haymitch nodded as well, still gingerly holding the rifle like an awkwardly cradled baby. He didn’t seem to know precisely how to handle it compared to the casual way the others did, though neither did she, for that matter.

“Well,” Cho finally said, with one of his smiles, “it’s a good thing we’ve got hours to go. We can teach them the basics.”

“I’m not sure they should get live ammo,” Waumbaugh pointed out. “They’re as likely to shoot us as the enemy until they’ve had practice. I mean, they won’t even know about kickback yet.”

“Wonderful. I’ll just carry the deadweight around and look heroic,” Johanna muttered. “And try to not get shot because I’m fucking useless if I’m weaponless.”

“They get live rounds,” Jackson cut in coolly, looking between her and Haymitch. “This isn’t a practice scenario. We’re going into combat. Just watch where you point that thing, and don’t pull the trigger unless you mean to kill.”

“We’ve got something that you don’t get shooting at target practice.” She’d tried a few times, those first Games, to train against the dummies, and even had she been clear-minded enough to go at it ruthlessly, she’d found out in the end it was nothing like death up close and personal. She’d never forget Clark pinning her down, gasping and bleeding and convulsing as he died; the stink of unwashed skin and fetid breath and fear and blood and his shitting and pissing himself as he died. She stared directly at Jackson, daring her to deny it. “He,” she jerked a thumb in Haymitch’s direction, “and I are the only two people on this hovercraft that actually know how to _mean_ to kill someone.” It said something for Jackson that the other woman didn’t look away or blink at being reminded that she had a pair of well-blooded killers on her hand. 

Jackson looked between her and Haymitch. Granted, she probably had an easier job of it with Johanna—younger, and she’d seen Johanna prove her lethality once again just a few days ago. Johanna saw her eyes lingering longer on Haymitch. “Get them trained up as best you can, Waumbaugh,” she said finally.

After that, Waumbaugh put them through hours of repetitive maintenance and loading of the rifle. Over and over—disassembling, assembling, cleaning the greasy parts and then scrubbing her hands so they weren’t slippery. Then loading, aiming and firing without an ammo clip shoved in the breech. She quickly lost count of it.

Johanna actually felt grateful for it, though. Trying to learn all the movements of it and make it into muscle memory rapidly, it left her no time to think about anything else. Her world narrowed down to a series of motions in sequence where everything made sense, and she could shut everything else out. The foreboding that seemed to hover over her, that old black malaise that made her worry that she’d lose it again, receded.

“Passable,” Waumbaugh said, when Johanna’s fingers began to fumble and cramp from repeatedly having to break down, reassemble, load an empty dummy clip, aim, and fire, all with Waumbaugh standing there with a damn stopwatch. “But are you both always this clumsy, or is it nerves?” Her tone was neutral, but the judgment was there just the same.

“Gee, I’m awfully sorry I’ve got some wounds that are healing and I also got fried by lightning less than thirty-six hours ago,” Johanna said between gritted teeth, suddenly really wanting to swing the butt of the rifle around and club the smug bitch upside her head. Her hands were certainly steady enough for that.

“And what’s your excuse?” Waumbaugh asked Haymitch dryly.

“I’m forty-one and I’m coming off drinking too much,” he said flippantly. “Sorry y’all didn’t feel like starting a war back when I was eighteen.” 

Waumbaugh blinked, looked like she wasn’t certain whether there was an insult in that or not and whether it was Haymitch aiming at her or Thirteen or himself. “Just be ready.

Hanging her rifle again on the rack, Johanna wiped down the leather palms of the fingerless shooting mitts, getting the last traces of oil off them. “Good thing it’s not winter and we’re wearing thick gloves,” she said. Apparently these were “summer issue”.

“Mm,” Haymitch said noncommittally, leaning over in his seat, elbows resting on his knees and his head down, shoulders tense.

Maybe it was easier for her. She’d been in a fight for her life just a few days before. It had been decades for him, and the nightmare of going back into that probably weighed heavily on him. Not to mention flippancy aside, he wasn’t at his best. Even as she watched, a trickle of sweat ran down his temple. “Look, you’ll be—“

“Don’t do anything stupid,” he cut her off. He looked up and over at her.

“I’m pretty sure what we’re doing is the very definition of stupid. Starting a rebellion?”

That earned her a quick wry smile of acknowledgement. “You know what I mean, though.”

“Yeah.” Of course. If she got killed, so soon after Katniss, that would be another blow to things. Funny feeling, to be told her life was actually valuable in some way. Even a week ago she’d been just “the Seven female”, utterly disposable to everyone. Nobody out there had hoped she would live. Or at least, even if someone like Haymitch or Finnick had probably wished she could survive, they’d had other priorities first. She would never be certain whether Haymitch would have sacrificed her for Katniss or Peeta, or Finnick for Mags or his own life, and she honestly didn’t want to know. Some questions were best left unanswered.

“You know this won’t be enough,” he said. “You’re right. People need to see action. But we need words too. If he’s effectively calling you a lying slut, we need to answer that.”

“And how are you proposing we do that?” She lowered her voice—even with the space everyone had given them, she didn’t want them listening to this. “You gonna claim I never fucked all those people?”

“Believe me,” he said dryly, “I’m well aware of bad choices made when drunk.”

It unnerved her to be so easily read. Liquid courage—better than going back to the Training Center alone, not to mention there was always the risk of Blight and Clover being in the Seven apartment. Plus a victor never paid in the Capitol. She felt like a few shots was the least the assholes owed her. But once the booze burned its way into her, she’d see somebody eyeing her with that mix of lust and awe. Suddenly proving to some stupid Capitolite that she had the power when it came to sex started to look like a good idea. She couldn’t have touched them when she was sober. As was, the morning after she usually ended up hung over and scrubbing herself down thoroughly in the shower; disgusted but at the same time still vaguely triumphant. “Would it really matter if I fucked them drunk or sober?”

“It matters that starting to drink to deal with your problems is—“ He gave a derisive snort. “You think I just picked up a bottle when I was sixteen the day after the funerals, darlin’, and I’ve been drunk every day since? It’s a slippery slope. The others, they started giving me drinks when bad shit happened. Then eventually I started giving them to you. Just…don’t keep at it, OK?” 

No, she’d known him for years. Even at thirty-three she’d seen him with a drink in hand often enough, but he was sober enough. She’d seen him chewing wintergreen candy to hide the odor on his breath. Only a few years down the road was when he entirely lost it and fell apart entirely. Maybe when he wasn’t quite twenty-six he’d lied to himself and said it was just a drink here or there. She looked at him now, how obviously embarrassed and uncomfortable he was. “Well, it’s not like I’ll be drinking at all either, in Thirteen. So the panties will stay on, Mom, I promise,” she said mockingly.

“Not my…” He growled lowly in frustration, shaking his head. “Back on point. We’ll need to tell ‘em about Snow. The murders. The whoring. I figured it would wait, but…”

She stayed silent, though it felt like her stomach lurched and dropped. The thought of exposing herself like that for the nation to see, of putting aside all her self-preservation and showing herself as a victim for them to mock or pity, made her dizzy with a sudden panic. She forced herself to breathe in deeply, trying to stave off the anxious fear. She’d agreed to this, hadn’t she? It was inevitable that this would come up. She’d promised the truth. She just hadn’t thought it would come up this soon. “He just executed a whole bunch of people and he didn’t exactly keep it a secret,” she pointed out. “No time like now to use that as proof that he’s done it before.”

“We’ll figure it out,” he replied. 

“Ten minutes to ETA, so everybody buckle in,” Jackson announced loudly. The hovercraft suddenly felt like a live wire, strung tight with tension and anticipation. Johanna buckled her harness, willing her fingers to be steady. “They’re buying our identification signals so far as friendlies.” 

“Remember, stick with me,” Dalton said, passing by them to take his seat again. “We’re going to try to land near the slaughterhouse so we can take the Peacekeepers in there down quickly, but they may be on alert.” 

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Haymitch repeated softly to her, his eyes steadily regarding her. He reached out a hand, hesitated as he watched her, and she watched him in return. She didn’t bark at him to fuck off. So he squeezed her shoulder briefly and then quickly let go. “Stay alive.” It sounded like an order or a plea more than advice.


	12. Chapter 12

Breakfast was a meal of pancakes and canned peaches. Despite not being from Seven, Lyme would still bet the closest the syrup had ever gotten to a maple tree was a matter of miles—it had the sickly-sweet yet bland taste of something lab-created. All in all, the meal was adequate, but tasteless; exactly enough calories to keep going, and nothing exciting about it for the taste buds.

She glanced over at Brutus, seeing him hunched over his tray. “Like old times at the Institute, isn’t it?” She clicked her fingernails against the metal tray, indicating the whole thing—the tray, the food, the communal dining, the uniforms, the rules.

He glanced up then with the ghost of a smile. “All it needs is oatmeal Mondays,” he agreed. 

At least she got that much from him. He’d walked around yesterday like he was in an angry daze. Then again, he’d acted like that pretty much ever since the card was read. His entire world had been ripped out from under him and he didn’t know what to make of it. 

He’d been the year above her at the Institute to start, but of course, once she hit sixteen, she’d gone into the senior candidate pool. By that point, after ten years of training, they’d culled the ranks. Only the top six, three males and three females, from each year made it that far. Brutus had been in there for a year, and as third-ranked male in the pool, he’d just missed the Quarter Quell. Twenty-five years she’d known him now. Known him better than most anyone in those early years after her victory, until she realized two things: he still felt too ashamed about his victory to make a life with her, and he bled deep Two red first, foremost, and always.

It wasn’t pretty seeing him that lost. But she couldn’t regret it happened. He’d lied to himself for too long. “So what now, Brute?” she asked bluntly.

He slapped down his fork. “I don’t know,” he snapped back. “What do you want me to say, Lyme? I’ll join your little…” He glared at her, his pale blue eyes alight with anger, the muscles of his jaw tight. She saw the twitch of it right near the small crescent scar in one cheek. “How long have you been a part of it?”

That was the other side of the coin. After so long, she was every bit as familiar to him, and a hurt anger at her betrayal was etched on every feature. “Formally? Five years. But it really started after Baria won,” she answered. “When you started telling her that getting whored out was her duty and how the Capitol showed they admired her.” A good thing he’d never asked her to marry him. She’d have wanted to kill him at that point. As was, things had cooled in the years since. She’d done her best to forget the good times, the nights when he’d been able to forget himself and his precious honor. He’d made his choice. “How fucking blind could you really be?” she demanded. “All those years bending over backwards to justify it, to tell her—you _knew_ she was Two, of course she’d listen to you as the senior victor!”

Brutus pushed up from the table. “Are we done?” he asked her icily, eyes flashing blue murder at her. She didn’t doubt that in his mind, he wished he had a sword in hand. Others were staring but to their credit, everyone else at the table carried on as if they weren’t right next to two big, pissed-off Two victors arguing. It probably helped that they’d seen more than a few arguments in Mentor Central in their time. Everyone existed in such a fishbowl up there that everyone knew everyone’s business, and politely ignored it even when it occurred right in front of them. She couldn’t count the number of times Haymitch must have walked in on fellow victors having sex in the lounge—including her and Brutus, admittedly.

The only ready weapons to hand were cutlery and trays, but Thirteen was full of idiots if they didn’t think those could be used as a weapon. She’d had to learn to kill with her bare hands—so had he. He came around the table, getting right in her face. She could smell the mint scent of toothpaste on his warm breath. At six foot four, he was one of the few men on Victors’ Mountain who was clearly taller than her. But she stared right back at him, refusing to be intimidated. If he wanted to make this public, so be it. She had nothing to be ashamed of in this case. “Baria’s dead,” she said, willing herself to not flinch as she said it. “You could easily have died in the arena too. And Snow just executed a bunch of innocent people who simply happened to be related to us.” 

It was difficult to call them “family”. Hers had never been a happy one. Hector Rathbone had married for duty after his twenty years in the Corps and then spent all his time diddling other women, and occasionally smacking the pesky kids he’d clearly never really wanted. Eosyne stayed hands off her kids and hands on the bottle to cope until she fell down the stairs deliberately, accidentally—or maybe Mommy had been pushed by Daddy dearest—when Lyme was twenty-two. So by this point she didn’t mourn her father’s execution at all. But Rufus and Helena still hurt. 

Rufus, as third-born, behind a Peacekeeper and an Institute cadet, the pressure was off. He’d become a schoolteacher. That hadn’t saved him. And his eldest, Troilus, shot down right there beside him. The three younger kids, though: baby Persephone was only four, and how old were Patroclus and Leander—fourteen and twelve? 

Helena became the mother to her siblings—five years older than Lyme, nine older than Rufus, and she had to act like a damn grownup. Helena had been up on that stage, after her own twenty years in the Corps, and a daughter of her own to raise for Two. Helena had done her duty, and she died for it anyway. 

Lyme had been born a child of duty, all right, and she was sick of it. She hadn’t talked to Helena in years except for occasional polite phone calls on birthdays and sending New Year’s cards and presents for the kids. But still—Helena had been hers, and their deaths were only because of their tie to her. She didn’t know where Iphigenia was either. Genie was only five. The phone call where Helena told Lyme that she was finally pregnant, laughing so happily, was one of the warmest interactions they’d had in a long time.

Fucking Coriolanus Snow—they should never have paid the price. “The ones that followed all the rules still paid. Hell, Two didn’t even _rebel_ last time around and we still ended up punished along with the rest. Your brother Quintus—he served with honor, retired, went to train Peacekeepers. You think the fact he and Lyra are training up more soldiers is be the only thing that’s spared their lives? And how long do you think that lasts if Snow gets pissed off again? My sister did her twenty years and she got her brains splattered all over that stage. So really, you want to tell me now how much our honor means to the Capitol, and how much the Capitol _loves_ us?”

Brutus stared at her, and she saw the small hemorrhages in his bloodshot eyes. Either he’d been crying or spent a sleepless night. She’d bet the latter. They all quickly learned that crying was unacceptable weakness. She saw the doubt and uncertainty and weariness in his expression. “Damn you, Lyme,” he said heavily, turning his face away from her.

So she’d won. Her heart didn’t leap in triumph at it, like it had when she’d heard those trumpets and Claudius announcing her name as the victor of the 52nd Games. There was no victory here, only ashes.

She was smarter than pressing him now, urging him on with words of “making it count” or whatever. Haymitch had given them that speech last night anyway. Brutus, as he always did, would come to it on his own or not at all.

Sitting down again and finishing the last of her pancakes, she eyed the rest of the table. Chantilly obviously was looking after haggard-looking Cashmere. Clover and Blight were wrapped up in each other. Annie and Chaff were talking quietly. Beetee and Wiress had eaten quickly and disappeared—apparently President Coin had grabbed them already and put them to work slaving on some technology project. And Haymitch and Johanna were off in Ten already.

Not much left for her to do here. She wasn’t the cuddly sort, which was putting it lightly. She couldn’t console Annie’s grief on having lost a boyfriend, or Chaff’s on losing a wife and child. Cashmere would rather hear from another One. Clover and Blight, and Beetee and Wiress, had all they needed already. She’d done everything she could thus far with Brutus. 

For a moment her anger surged against Haymitch. Leaving her behind? Like he was in good shape to go into the field and fight, compared to her? He looked like shit, and he obviously was suffering from lack of booze. Still…if anyone could keep Johanna’s excesses and smart mouth reined in and get her focused correctly, it was probably Haymitch. Haymitch was smart enough to think ahead, plus he was one of the only people that girl ever bothered to respect enough to listen to him. 

But being let here with nothing to do definitely chafed at her. Two would be difficult to bring into the war. Yesterday’s “demonstration” would only make the hardliners dig in all the more determinedly, refusing to buck the Capitol. If it had been up to her, she’d have started things off there. It would take the longest, and the more Snow’s actions went unanswered, the more his claws tightened into Two. 

She had no appetite for the last of her meal, but ate it anyway. Practicality dictated it—never knew when the next meal would come. But she left in a hurry, determined to actually do something rather than be told to sit like a good girl and let the adults handle it. She’d stood aside for too many years and let the Capitol do what it would. Even in the last few years, when she’d finally dared to get involved, she’d never been able to do much.

She had to ask directions several times, but the steel door of Command was shut as usual, with guards posted all along the corridor. “I want to see the president,” she said once again, staring down at the guard right at the door, a small man with ashy-gold Three skin and remarkable pale gold eyes, who was a good six inches shorter than her. She could almost have rested her chin on the top of his head, on his shaved-down coffee-brown hair, but the intensity in that dark gaze warned her that what he might not have in stature, he apparently made up in some other way. There had been Two tributes like that. Cloelia—the little knife thrower from the 74th. Clove, they’d called her. Good move by the Institute; giving her a nickname that the Capitol could pronounce and remember more easily, rather than her proud Two birth name.

“Do you have an actual reason?” Anklebiter asked.

“I’ve got information for her,” Lyme answered. “I’ve also got contacts inside District Two that she’s going to want to hear from.” She’d been taught better than to sass off. Respectful, polite request—cheese caught more rats than rotten apples. So she wasn’t surprised when it only took about two minutes before the door opened and Anklebiter ushered her in. 

President Coin glanced up at her. “What do you have?”

No bullshit, straight to the point. Lyme could appreciate that. “There are certain people in Two who have been unhappy with the way things are for years. So they’ve been rebelling their own way.” Not burning flags and rioting—something far more effective. “They’ve recruited. They have Peacekeepers in uniform in every district spying and ready to report back to them.”

Coin stared. One slim grey eyebrow rose, but that was the only expression of shock the woman permitted herself. “Why was I not made…”

“Best to not have all the slabs of slate on a single train.” Plutarch hadn’t known, and while she’d let Haymitch know years ago that Two had its own underground resistance if it could be of any use, he’d quietly told her that it was safer he not know the details right then. He was right on that, so she hadn’t told him about the spying.

“Fine. Give me the contact information and…”

“I’ll be the one that gets in touch,” Lyme interrupted. “It’s my contact. He trusts me. He won’t trust you.”

“Then you can inform him on this initial contact that we’re allies and he can speak to us, of course. For information this valuable, it’s too risky to have a single contact person, in case you’re unavailable. Thank you for your assistance, Rathbone, I’m certain your contact will be invaluable to our rebellion.” Lyme felt the jaws close gently on her, outmaneuvered. She couldn’t insist on being the sole point of contact without sounding selfish and petty.

Fingers clenched tightly on the chair back, looking down at her white knuckles, she forced herself to relax. It didn’t matter, did it? If it got the job done…that was what mattered, and it was better than the years of silently taking it and pretending she was enthusiastically on board with the Capitol, her discontent growing painfully like a cancer inside her every single year.

This was what she’d wanted for the last ten years, and now Clytemnestra Rathbone might actually be able to do something about it, so she put on the headset and sat down at the console, dialing a number she’d never imagined she’d have to call when she went to the Capitol for the Quell. _If something happens,_ Phineas Fog had told her, handing her the chit of paper, _if anything comes of this…call._

The phone rang once, twice; she hung up, dialed again immediately, let it ring three times; hung up one more time, dialed again and hung up after only one ring. Then she dialed the second number, the traceless phone he presumably kept silent and well-hidden, to be dug out only on that signal, and she breathed a sigh of relief as she heard the voice on the end of the line: “Hello?” The old man might be around eighty, but he was still a stubborn geezer, and cunning enough to play the expected part of a long-since honorably retired Head Peacekeeper who did nothing but sit in front of the television, watch the last of his friends die off, and generally bitch nostalgically about the old days when kids were respectful and the districts were better controlled. 

“This is Lyme,” she told him, “and Haymitch and Johanna started stirring the shit out in Ten. But if you’ve got a status report on the other districts for us…” Fog may have befriended Lyme’s uncle Nero during their mutual tour of duty in Four and that made an excuse for her to come visit him, but after ten years, what made Fog turn against the Capitol still remained an utter mystery, nor had he asked her for her story. It didn’t really matter. All she’d been given was the order to pass important information on the victors, and the fact that the resistance in Two had eyes and ears wearing Peacekeeper white in every single district, and that information would be invaluable right now. For her part there was plenty about the victors she didn’t tell him—the safety of double blind.

“They’re starting in Ten?” Fog said with interest.

“I wasn’t invited to the war council,” she managed to not sound resentful, “but that’s Haymitch’s plan, as I understand it.” 

Fog gave a dry chuckle. “Trust that boy to get ambitious.” He’d been Head in Twelve the years Haymitch was growing up—perhaps he even remembered a young Haymitch. There was a pause on the other end, and then, “We’ll check in with our agents. Give it four hours and then call me back.” The line disconnected with a sudden click. 

Lyme hung the headset back up and stood from the seat, clearing it for whoever might need it. “Gotta call back later,” she told Coin. 

“Very well. As it appears you haven’t, you should consult with Heavensbee and pool your current information. And you’ll update Abernathy and Mason when they call from District Ten with the situation there. That will help decide our next moves.” 

She didn’t have much to tell Plutarch Heavensbee, to be honest. Nothing he probably didn’t already know. The value would be in the report Fog would relay to her. But she didn’t tell Coin that. Still, Lyme felt a little better—at least now she had some sense of direction. “So you’ve got Haymitch and Johanna out in the field. And what about the rest of us?” she asked, unwilling to let that go. “Are we just going to sit on our asses for the war?”

Coin looked up at her with an expression of interest. “Every capable adult in Thirteen can and likely will be called upon to go into combat. I assure you, you’ll have your chance to get into the fight, Rathbone.”

“Good.” So she’d get sent to Two when the time came. She couldn’t imagine the idea of a free Two right now, but she could dream about it. She’d fight, and she’d win, for Helena, for Enobaria. For every single Two citizen who’d served loyally, with faith and honor, and instead been shit upon by the Capitol and Coriolanus Snow—dismissed as boring, taken for granted, made into the faithful pet to be kicked and abused at will—she wouldn’t fail.

It seemed like the Capitol had forgotten: sometimes a faithful guard dog, if abused enough finally had enough and would turn on its master.

~~~~~~~~~~

The hovercraft landed unchallenged, and Haymitch breathed a slow sigh of relief at that. He’d almost forgotten that the tight-strung nerves of anticipation, on the verge of a situation where he’d have to kill or get killed, had been the worst part of the Second Quell. He had barely slept the night before the Games began. Of course, he’d barely slept last night either, but it wasn’t only facing this ordeal.

He’d definitely gone into those Games in a hell of a lot better shape. Back then he’d been able to focus with clarity on the singular goal of doing what it took to get himself through it alive. Today it felt like everything within him was a mess, a jumbled and broken heap of emotional shit yanking him in a dozen different directions at once, a thousand different things to worry about, and every bit of it demanding his attention.

It looked like he wasn’t the only one who was a bit of a hot mess, as Johanna had gotten more and more fidgety and anxiously snappish as the hovercraft ride went on. Right now she clutched her rifle and looked around her a little bit wide-eyed, leaned over to mutter to him, “If I don’t get out of this fucking box in the next five minutes…” 

“We will,” he told her, trying for a confidence he didn’t feel, that nagging voice telling him that he was a middle-aged fat mess currently feeling like shit to boot, that he’d fail, that she’d end up killed, that it would all be his fault. _I can’t, I can’t…_

When he was young, he’d taught Jonas Hawthorne about snares, and Jonas taught him to weave willow switches into a barrier to act as a fish trap in some of the small creeks. This felt like that—it was a dam only in the loosest sense in that might catch and hold back some big things, but all the water came gushing through all the same.  
“Your bootlace is untied,” she told him. He glanced down and saw she was right, as well as viewing the fidgeting taps of her sturdy black leather combat boots against the rubber matting—heel-toe, heel-toe, over and over. They’d made her put on the damn armband.

Crossing his legs with his foot up on his knee to get at the boot, he tied the lace again, trying to use that one small task to focus his mind. It worked, at least somewhat. “Remember, we’re allies. Stay by me,” he told her. He tried hard to not think of how Maysilee had walked away, and the next time he saw her, twitching and bleeding, dying—but in trying to not think of it, of course he thought of it. Suddenly in his mind Maysilee’s face transformed into Katniss’, and he shut that out only with effort.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m too precious to the rebellion to die, got it,” Johanna muttered sullenly.

“Or maybe I’ve watched enough people die I’m really not in the mood for one more, so don’t just do anything stupid.” The irritated words flew out before he could think better of them, and he wondered anew, astonished and angry with himself, exactly when he turned into someone who couldn’t keep his damn mouth shut.

Johanna’s eyes went startled wide for a moment, then narrowed abruptly in anger, brows drawing together above a dark scowl, twisting her features into an expression that put him in mind of a wary wolf ready to take a snap. He could see her almost readying for giving him some snarky, pissy comeback. Instead, she looked away. “Don’t do anything stupid yourself, old man. Me? I don’t plan to give Coriolanus Snow what he wants.”

“Good.” At least they had bulletproof vests, which they’d been ordered to finally strap on as the hovercraft descended. He could see why they’d been left off. Even after a few minutes, he was sweating beneath it. Fat lot of good they’d do if they got shot in the head. Still, he’d have been grateful for the solid protection of the armor plates back in the arena. With that, the door lowered. They were near enough that the bright, natural sunlight almost seemed to hurt his eyes, even after only a day and a half of fluorescents. But he couldn’t help breathing in the smell of fresh air, even if it carried heavy, earthy scents: sun-baked dust and animal shit.

“Wait just a minute,” Dalton cautioned them, holding up a cautionary hand as the first dark-uniformed soldiers poured out the hatch, rifles at the ready. “They’re letting a few squads go in first and make sure the path is clear.” Haymitch watched Cressida’s assistant, he of the many piercings, adjust the camera harness he wore.

He tensed as the first shots were fired, initially an isolated _crack_ here and there and then escalating, becoming a staccato rhythm, point and counterpoint, the different tones indicating how distant the shots were. It was like someone had kicked a tracker jacket hive and now it was boiling over. “Captain, path to the slaughterhouse is clear,” there came a woman’s voice over the radio attached to Jackson’s shoulder, oddly sweet and mild in its tones, “we’re headed for the foreman’s building!” 

Jackson motioned them forward. Johanna looked at him one last time and there was something troubled in her expression as she asked, “Does it strike you as kind of funny that we’re heading for the _slaughterhouse_?”

“At least they call it what it is,” he told her grimly, “unlike the arena.” He gripped his rifle tighter in his hands, trying to find some kind of reassurance in it. At least this time he wouldn’t have to race to get a weapon in order to fight. Dalton hit the ramp running and he was obliged to follow.

The sunlight, the smell, the swirl of red dust in the air, the sound of rifle fire and people shouting, all were immediately even more overwhelming. He closed his eyes for one moment. He hadn’t let the arena allow his senses to override his mind, all those years ago. He could do it again. _Focus. Shut it out._ Eyes open again, already he spied a few crumpled heaps down on the ground as they ran, not noticing whether they wore Peacekeeper white, Thirteen grey, or Ten civilian clothing. There was no time, or perhaps it was equally likely he really didn’t want to know.

Waumbaugh kicked in the front door, her rifle snapping up and a shot fired all in a single smooth motion. “Looks like at least one knew we’re coming,” she yelled.

Dalton muttered, “Well, then they all know,” and then called loudly enough for the rest of them, “Rifles ready, let’s go. Waumbaugh, Chang, you go check the guard’s area and clear ‘em out,” he pointed them to the left. “Phoenix,” he spared Johanna a slight wry smile, “Abernathy, the rest of you, let’s check out the floor.”

Following Johanna, they pushed past the dead Peacekeeper, through a heavy door onto a balcony overlooking a huge warehouse. The cold industrial fluorescent lighting was like Thirteen, and the stark white walls and stainless steel of tables, conveyors, and hooks only seemed to make it all the colder. But what caught his eye most readily was red—thickly congealed puddles of blood on the floor and the tables, the half-hacked red-purple carcasses hanging up on the hooks as Ten workers in blue jumpsuits butchered them. The scent hit him in a wave. Even cut with the cat-piss smell of bleach, there was still that stink of death and old, rotten blood built up over years that didn’t wash out.

He gripped the railing, trying to breathe through his mouth and not take in the stench of murder, trying to not shudder at it. But like that, he was sixteen again and seeing the dark red caked into the lines of his hands, under and around his nails, breathing in the smell of old blood after weeks without being able to wash. He’d been unable to escape the killings he’d done, and suddenly his stomach lurched and he did his best to not puke.

The fact Johanna jerked his arm and yanked him aside as a bullet whizzed past his head and pinged sharply off the steel behind him snapped him out of it, and he looked over as Dalton took aim and snapped off a shot. Suddenly there was a headless Peacekeeper down on the ground, his blood mingling with that of the cows and sheep. “Stay on target,” Johanna said between her teeth.

He didn’t bother offering excuses, now alert enough to see the white-uniformed Peacekeepers interspersed among the workers. And while most clutched what looked like riot batons sparking with blue electricity at the tip, at least a couple of them brandished pistols. They were sitting targets up there on the balcony, and Johanna must had recognized it in the same instant, because she charged down the stairs in a rush, heading directly for a Peacekeeper starting towards the stairs, tall and stocky and yelling at the workers to get down on the floor.

Given no choice but to not leave her to get herself killed, he followed her closely, and almost ran into Johanna’s back as she suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, like a terrified rabbit. He heard the rough sound of a gasp as the Peacekeeper swung the baton at her. It must have been the electricity, sizzling and crackling audibly. To hell with the rifle, it was useless and he didn’t trust it, so he dropped it, let it clatter to the floor, and lunged instead for the knives he saw on the table directly by his right side, laying there next to a sink. The blades dripped water still, apparently recently rinsed. The smooth, well-worn plastic of the handle felt good in his hand.

Focused on Johanna as the man was, Haymitch caught the Peacekeeper’s outstretched forearm with his first, almost wild swipe, and the sudden stark bloom of crimson against the white sleeve of his uniform startled him, almost like an explosion of blood. The man cursed, switched the baton to his other hand and reared back for another swing. Stepping into the space, giving no room for the swing, Haymitch saw he was wearing body armor as well. So instinctively, he went for the throat in a backhanded slash. 

Twenty-five years wasn’t nearly enough distance to forget. Lunging inside the reach of a weapon meant to keep someone at arm’s length, getting close enough to smell the sweat. The sticky-warm feel of blood pumping out and coating his fingers was exactly the same—so were the groan and death-rattle in the man’s throat, the wide eyes slowly fading to a vacant emptiness. It was déjà vu, as if the arena had been only yesterday. 

The Peacekeeper dropped to the floor—more dead meat. He’d killed again, and it had been simple, the old instincts rising like mementos taken from a dusty attic trunk, perfectly intact. He wanted to puke again right then, not for the death of the Peacekeeper, but simply because it had been so _easy_.

No time, because the next Peacekeeper was coming at them, and now the aches and discomfort and the worries didn’t matter, because his blood was up and the adrenaline surged through his veins. The certainty of instinct and a simple, singular goal, _stay alive and keep her alive_ , was suddenly sweet as honey.

Some of the workers were down on the ground already, kneeling obediently. Some still stood there, seemingly in a daze. Johanna grabbed a cleaver, the heavier weight probably more akin to her axes, and yelled to the workers, “This is your chance, c’mon and fight with us!” 

That seemed to break the spell for some of them, and he saw the surge of blue like a tsunami overwhelming some of the white uniforms, as he turned to face his next opponent. Johanna had already taken care of the woman by the time he got to her, though, and like a matched team, they headed for the next one. He heard Dalton bellowing something, but didn’t listen.

It was all over within a minute or so. Whether it was animal blood or human, as they picked their way through the slaughterhouse, gathering up all the knives, and the Peacekeepers’ batons and pistols, the ground ran red with blood. Their boots squelched in it and left sticky red footprints on the few previously-unstained patches of black rubber matting. The Peacekeepers had died hard deaths; many of them were obviously hacked and stabbed numerous times, uniforms soaked through with red.

Eager to escape the smell, he followed Johanna as she led the way out into the sunlight, followed by the throng of Ten workers brandishing all manner of weapons. He’d picked up the rifle and handed it to a man who said he knew how to use it. The knife in his hand was what he trusted.

Out in the open, the Peacekeepers’ rifles could be used to deadlier effect than the close quarters of the slaughterhouse, and with each shot, someone in the throng of Ten’s workers spun like a flung rag doll down into the dirt, but something had been set in motion that couldn’t be stopped. Thirteen’s rifles rang out every bit as sharply, and alongside the dusty-brown skin and dark hair of south Ten natives in their blue jumpsuits or jeans and shirts, the grey uniforms flanked the edges, some of the Tens now with Thirteen-provided rifles. 

There were too many of them for the Peacekeepers to contain, and more joining all the time, and when the knives and rifles ran out, apparently they’d charge in with bare hands and fury if need be.

He wasn’t sure where the shout began and with whom, but soon it became a roar from hundreds of throats, a harmony that was almost like a living thing. _Freedom._ It was a chant, an angry demand by people who’d been denied for far too long.

In the end, a good dozen white-uniformed Peacekeepers seemed to realize their only chance was to throw themselves on the mercy of the mob. They put up their hands, and as the urgency of the fight had faded, the surrender was actually accepted, after one or two of them were cut down and the others yelled and demanded that it stop. 

On their knees in the dirt, hands on their heads, everybody stood back from them as if afraid of being contaminated. Or maybe the long-ingrained instinct to give Peacekeepers their distance returned, even if just a little.

“Here’s the deal,” Johanna called, loud enough to be heard by the crowd. “We’ve taken back this place. You’re free to do what you want now. You’re the first ones in Panem to take back your home. But if you’re the only free area of Panem, eventually, the Capitol will come here and take it back. It can’t stop here. We’ve brought more rifles. You’re good shots, good riders. So you’ve got the means to go start freeing other farms in your district, or even Nine or Eleven. So if you’re willing to go with me, I’ll fight with you.”

It was brilliant. She immediately cast herself as their equal in the fight, not an idol to look up to, someone to worship and follow blindly. “I will too,” he said loudly, stepping forward and recognizing it was a moment that hung on the edge. He could see Johanna’s tension, realizing it as well, and probably fearing that this would fall flat. They might not accept the gesture she’d just made, take the path she asked. The fact that Cressida was taping the damn thing was the least of their worries. The people of Ten looked at them, at their foreign grey uniforms, but also the weapons in their hands, the spatters of blood on them.

Dalton joined them, and Waumbaugh, and then finally, a few of the Ten workers. The first one to do so, a short, solid, middle-aged woman with deeply tanned skin and sun-streaks in her dark brown hair, said loudly, “Screw it, I saw it. They got right up close into the shit in the slaughterhouse for us. They didn’t get that blood on them by standing back. And they’re victors. They know how to fight…how to win.” She offered Johanna her hand. “Nadji Ross. I’m the forewoman here at Southlands.” 

Well, their forewoman taking Johanna’s hand and joining up made a difference. Quickly enough more stepped forward, and it seemed to break the ice, as others steadily joined. To his surprise, four of the Peacekeepers risked getting up off their knees, unbuttoning their white uniform jackets and dropping them in the red dirt, even as the others howled in protest at them. Some openly suspicious glances greeted the new arrivals, but nobody tried to deny them in that instant.

“We,” Dalton said wearily, “clearly have got to teach the two of you to handle that damn rifle better so you’re not just throwing it aside. And also how to ride a horse, I suppose.”

“Sure, all yours, after we get a shower and some clean clothes,” he said. But despite the smell and stickiness of blood and the weariness rapidly descending over him now, he couldn’t help but smile as people hugged each other and slapped each other’s backs, and the enthusiastic yell of _Freedom_ rang out into the summer air once again, this time an exultant sound of joy rather than rage.


	13. Chapter 13

One thing Johanna would definitely have to credit to the people of southern Ten—they could be ready to hit the road with an efficiency that would have done any Seven lumberjack proud. Within a few hours of the victory cries in the central square, the volunteers to become mounted raiders were raised, packed, and ready to hit the road. Weapons were distributed to those who would stay behind. Nobody kidded themselves that Snow likely wouldn’t sent more troops to try to retake the station.

After a cursory riding lesson, they assigned her three horses, two a deep rich sorrel—the only difference she could see between the two was white socks on the forelegs of the one, and the third a ghost-pale dappled grey. “We _always_ bring at least one spare mount,” the laconic assistant foreman, Drover Crozier, advised her. She could tell from Nadji’s wistful glances that she probably wanted to head out with them as well, but to her credit, the woman stayed behind to take care of her responsibilities to Southlands. “But we’re bringing as many horses as we can. Figure we’ll pick up others along the way if this scheme of yours work, and they’ll need a mount.”

“We’ll have to be careful of the aerial,” Haymitch cautioned, gripping the reins a little too tightly on his own deep grey, who gave a whuffle of irritation at him. “That many horses are gonna be pretty damn obvious from above without forest cover or mountains to hide in.”

Drover laughed. “Y’all both never got down here during a Victory Tour, did you now? They only go up near Centerville.” Shaking her head, Johanna acknowledged she hadn’t. “Ten prairie is so tidy in Capitol movies. Probably so the camera can see what the hell people are doing as they ride around heroically. Sometimes the tall-grass prairie will be our cover, man, you’ll see. Doesn’t matter if they use heat trackers from a hovercraft, it’ll just be one huge blob of living heat. They won’t know us from a herd of cattle or bison out there. Even in the shorter grass, they’ll have to descend close enough to confirm it visually that we’ll know they’re there and we can scatter in a hurry.” 

They left Southlands as the sun was beginning to sink in the west, a tight cluster of a close to two hundred riders and so many horses that the thunder of their hooves drowned out anything anyone could have said to Johanna. As was, she kept more than busy enough clutching the reins and trying to match her movements to the horse’s bouncing. Maybe it was a good thing she couldn’t hear anybody laugh at her clumsiness, or perhaps even make an asshole remark about how well-practiced hips like hers ought to have better rhythm. 

She was glad in that moment for the gear the Ten quartermaster, Alatau, had given her—especially the hat, bandana, and the sunglasses, which kept her head covered and the summer sun out of her eyes, and kept the gritty red dust out of her eyes, nose, and mouth. When she looked over at the others around her, and especially at Haymitch, geared up similarly and riding beside her, she couldn’t help a chuckle. They looked like they were bandits from some weird Capitol film.

She saw quickly enough what Drover had meant. Soon after leaving Southlands, the cracked, bare ground yielded to grasslands, a sea of green and gold, stretching unbroken as far as the eye could see, here and there a gently undulating small rise or dip. Everyone tugged their bandanas back down with relief. Most of the grass was at least knee height, with some of it the height of a man. Sometimes she could even reach out and touch the heavy, bowed heads of the stalks with her fingertips, as the horses headed through it like fish rippling through the water of a stream. _Finn would have enjoyed that,_ she thought, and shut her eyes, trying to fight the sudden swell of tears that threatened her. Even if she could easily have claimed her eyes were simply irritated by something, she didn’t want to risk it. 

Several hours went by, and Drover finally called a halt when it became too dark to see, with only meager light of the fingernail sliver of a quarter moon. It was hard to clearly see behind ten feet in front of her by that point, and she was frankly exhausted, the horse’s slow pace rocking her in a lulling rhythm. If not for her own thoughts, and the pain in her body, she might well have gone to sleep in the saddle. She slid down from the grey’s back, her strained thighs and much-abused ass screaming in protest in a way that brought back some uncomfortable memories. She clutched the horn of the saddle for a minute, the horse standing there patiently as she did it, until she felt like she could stand on her own. It was another few minutes before she could walk.

Dalton found her there as she finished getting through instructions of getting the horse’s saddle off for the night. “Not easy for greenies,” he said sympathetically. “But you came through.”

“Not much choice,” she managed, forcing her rubbery, painful legs to bear her towards where the central campfire on a small rise already began to light up the night. It was like the arena—keep up and adapt, or else.

When it came to dinner, some of them grumbled that there was no chuck wagon, whatever that meant, but in traveling swift and light, they were restricted to what they could carry in their saddlebags for provisions. Still, they’d packed well even for that, and a long drink from her canteen and several skewers of fresh meat so hot off the fire they burned her tongue, went a long way. It was better eating than she’d had either in the arena—she’d decided she hated the odd taste of seafood—or in Thirteen’s cafeteria.

A flask of something was passed around but the celebration was muted, mainly because everyone among them must have realized that the day’s work in taking back one corner of District Ten was only the start of things. But now they all wore a red bandana armband, an echo of the stupid phoenix armband Thirteen had made her wear—Johanna saw it first with pride and then with increasing trepidation as they came to talk to her, congratulate her, thank her for helping come start the fight and standing with them. “That was far more than Katniss ever did for Ten,” one man said, his face shining with admiration as he insisted on shaking her hand. 

Looking at the glimmer of hope in their eyes in the fireglow, hearing their laughter and enthusiasm, it was obvious they started to believe—and though she’d signed up for the whole Phoenix bit, she hoped like hell they didn’t believe in her. Head spinning with all the ways she’d fail, suddenly it was too hard to breathe and she couldn’t be among them right then.

Seven as she was, of course she headed for a distant, twisted tree sitting there prominent on the prairie, and as the noise faded as she walked into the darkness, she felt the relief of the quiet, alone with her thoughts. All around her the fireflies sparked in the night, tiny twinkles of greenish light swirling and dancing, as if for the sheer joy of being alive, an echo of the stars above. She’d always done her best thinking outdoors anyway. 

As she got closer she saw there was another tiny glow by the cottonwood, a smoldering reddish-orange, and she saw Haymitch sitting there underneath the tree, the cigarette dangling loosely from his fingertips—so she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t bear to be around other people right that moment.

“Picking up another vice for as long as you can before we get back to Thirteen?” she asked dryly, waiting to see if he told her to beat it.

“Oh, when I turned down the drink our new allies just offered me, well, it would be downright rude of me to turn down the smoke as well, don’t you think?” He laughed and raised the cigarette to his lips, taking another drag on it. The burning end of it suddenly flared a brighter orange. “Maybe I should have gone to the cigarettes to begin instead of the liquor—they used to give me cigarettes sometimes, for the image, you know, probably saw me on the television lighting up like a chimney back when you were a kid.” She had, could easily recall an image of Haymitch at some Capitol function, his mouth with an arrogant smirk and a cigarette, elegantly dressed but casually tousled. His whole image had been calculated to suggest a smart, cocky man who really didn’t give a shit what people thought of him. She could have laughed at that. As if he fooled anyone who actually knew him with the idea that he didn’t care what they thought of him. “Back then I thought it’d be so damn _appropriate_ slowly killing myself that way, coughing my lungs up like a good little Twelve coal miner.” His voice was gruff and he didn’t look at her, but the morbid turn of thought and how casually he was admitting these things unsettled her.

A good part of her wished he would go away so she could be alone out here, but the other part wanted him to stick around because it seemed like he was the only one who could simply talk to her as a person, could look at her and not see either a bitch or a heroine. “Got another one?” she asked impulsively, if for no other reason than to have an excuse to stick around.

“Nope.” Though he plucked his cigarette from his lips and offered it to her. “Here, if you really want a puff. I’ve kissed you and then some, darlin’, so I suppose this ain’t much against that.” 

The sudden reversal surprised her, and the faintly mocking tone. He’d always shut up about that. It was the one thing she could bring up to make him back down, and here he was, the one wielding it like a whip. “Hey, fuck you—and if you’re gonna say ‘Already did that’, I swear…” She defiantly grabbed the cigarette from him, all the same, and took a puff on it.

Rather than having a sly comeback, he asked flatly, “You really want it to go like this?”

It was like having a rug jerked out from under her and smashing flat on her face, and she gritted her teeth. Suddenly she could taste the blood, salt and iron on her tongue, and jerked back in confusion. But it was real as she then felt the burn of her split upper lip, opened again by how she’d clenched tightly around the cigarette. Plucking it cigarette out, wincing at the pain, she held it between her thumb and forefinger. The crescent smear of her blood was almost black in the darkness against the white paper. She was suddenly reminded of Snow, and her stomach turned uncomfortably at it. “I…uh…don’t think you want this back.”

He took it from her and calmly stubbed it out in the dirt, grinding it with a twist of his wrist. “Probably not. Fucking things will kill me anyway, right?” He laughed in a single short bark, as if he couldn’t muster the energy for anything more, shaking his head. “About time it’s my turn.” As he tipped his head back, resting it against the tree trunk, now she saw the lingering traces of dampness on his cheeks. He’d been out here, having his tears in privacy. So he didn’t want anybody else to see him cry either.

It had been like running herself off her feet ever since Reaping Day, never given a moment to stop and rest and think. Gemma Waltz drawing the slip with her name had only sealed what Johanna already knew would happen. But after that, the train ride, the training, plotting with Haymitch to form the alliance and how to keep Beetee and Wiress alive, the arena, trying to keep going after Katniss’ death, after Finnick, then being taken to Thirteen, thrust into this role, trading shots with Snow and then coming here. Everything had built and built because she didn’t have the time or energy to think about it, let alone deal with it and start to take the pressure off. 

And that anxious fear seemed to have only built all the more rapidly since that hovercraft picked her up, and how she had to try harder to keep herself focused on _anything_ —the doctor questioned her about whether she was feeling things like that. The lightning strike must have fucked her up. She’d frozen in the slaughterhouse at that first Peacekeeper, almost gotten killed, because of that stupid cattle prod with its crackling electricity, and the still-sharp memory of pain and confusion after the lightning. If not for Haymitch…well, in that case, Plutarch might have gotten only a tape of some wonderful footage of his precious Phoenix getting killed.

The terror and relief of having someone who actually got it washed over her, and as if sensing an outlet, the weight of everything once again rammed itself against her resolve, and it won, breaking through. “They look at me like I’m something,” she blurted out before she could help herself, waving a hand back towards the campfires. “Like I can actually do something for them, like I won’t get them killed. They didn’t see the last arena footage. I couldn’t save Finnick, I couldn’t keep Peeta from getting cut down, for fuck’s sake. They’re going to see, and then when they turn on me, they’ll remember what I really am to them.” She’d once again be the bitch, the slut, the deceptive and untrustworthy one. As usual, the first instinct was to lash out. “What were you thinking, asshole? Thinking _I_ could do this?”

“Maybe we can’t do it,” he said softly. “But we still have to try.” He breathed out slowly, as if bracing himself for something. “I didn’t see the end either. Was on the hovercraft, and we were too far up for me to see Finn, Gloss, or Enobaria. So…Finnick?”

She looked down at her hands, nervously tracing the patterns of the lightning burns. Some of the events of those final hours had muddled, some had turned into blanks. She wished she could forget this one. “Beetee needed his trident. Finnick ended up fighting with a broken tree branch, and Enobaria...” She shuddered suddenly. “I…crawled through somebody’s blood on the way to Peeta.” He waited, listening, saying nothing, though suddenly his hand rested lightly on her shoulder. “She cut him open, wide open,” she whispered, certain of it as she said it, despite her mind trying to deny it. The stark image came to her, like a still photograph. “I don’t know if he was dead when you got there, or just dying.”

Haymitch didn’t answer right away. Her heartbeat pounded in her own ears. Then finally he spoke, his tone unsteady, saying the words almost gingerly. “There’s a chance Snow might be lying about Gloss and Enobaria to screw with Cash, Lyme, and Brutus. But Finnick…” 

She said it, because obviously he struggled to force out the words. “Snow knew he was our friend, he was clearly part of the plan, and Snow has other victors to use as hostages. Finn’s useless to him, except as a message to us.” There was no way Snow would have left Finnick Odair alive.

“Then let’s hope he was dead.”

She glanced over at him. “Be honest.” She’d seen the footage of him, young and running through the pristine arena woods, intestines bulging between his fingers. “What’s the likelihood he died quickly of a gut wound?”

“If that was his blood, Baria must have clipped an artery. The gut wound would have just been painful. But that would have made him go fast enough.”

“Fuck!” She lashed out, pounded her fist against the tree, almost enjoying the flash of pain that rocketed through her. “Fuck _all of this_!” She did it again. “This is how messed up it all is, we’re actually hoping he died quickly so Snow can’t execute him on a stage as another little ‘fuck you’ to me like he did with Rhus Amsell?” 

Suddenly the rage was no effective dam and now she was crying, hot angry tears and swallowing against the tight knot in her throat. But the habits of years were hard to undo, and giving way to her anger and fear meant giving in to the monster prowling around the edges of her mind, promising oblivion. Even as she felt the first tears fall, she tried desperately to get a lock on it.

“I’m sorry,” Haymitch told her. She felt a surge of gratitude that he didn’t reach out to hold her, or run away in awkwardness. He simply let her struggle through it, and pretended like it was no big deal to him.  
“Bud and Acacia were old friends too, but Rhus…” That knot in her throat worked itself tight again. “We grew up together. And I’d wanted him for years. He wanted me too, apparently, had for a couple years before my Games. Only told me after I came back from the 67th that he’d been trying to nut up all over again for a year because now I was a _victor_ and _too good for him_ and he wanted us to give it a try.” Even now she could summon the picture of Rhus that day, his earnest hazel eyes and the reddish tinge in his loam-brown hair, too long and falling messily over his forehead. Telling her that she was too fine for him now, when she stood there thinking of her body and how in weeks past it had become a plaything to fuck, bloodied and bruised and abused. 

Seeing the look on his face, she’d thought about dragging him somewhere and fucking him, seeing if it was different. It wouldn’t have mattered. She wouldn’t be a virgin again, let alone the girl she’d been before the arena. Thinking about how her first kiss, first fuck, had been pure desperation with Haymitch Abernathy instead of Rhus Amsell, all because of how Rhus didn’t have the guts to tell her even a month earlier, she’d hated him in that moment. _Yeah, well, I don’t want you, Rhus,_ she told him, turning away, rage and heartbreak at war within her.

“Well, it’s no easy thing,” Haymitch commented, his hand finally dropping from her shoulder, “being a teenage boy trying to tell a girl he’s known since they were littles together that suddenly things have changed and he’s in love with her.”

The girl he’d loved—only a figure in a photograph to Johanna, one that Snow had shown her. She’d barely looked long enough to see a long-dead girl her own age, one with a heart-shaped face, and Twelve’s grey eyes, olive skin, and black hair, before looking away. “How long did you know her?”

“Long time, since we were eight or so.” He laughed softly, a little sadly, looking upwards towards the vast expanse of the stars. “But she kissed me first when we were fifteen, I’ll be honest. I’d been caught stupid for months thinking of how to say something.”

“Haymitch Abernathy, lost for words?” she mocked him, but gently. Even though her eyes still stung, she couldn’t help but smile to imagine the kid he must have been. The smile vanished quickly. Nostalgia for who they’d been before the Capitol destroyed them wouldn’t have helped. “What was her name?” she ventured. He’d said it back when they were watching Snow’s execution propo, but honestly, it hadn’t stuck in her mind. And it embarrassed her now to realize that while she’d known about the dead girl who’d been part of Snow’s warning, she’d never even asked Haymitch her name, let alone about her. It seemed too personal a grief to intrude upon. 

But it had been so long since she could talk about any of them to anyone that it felt good, even as agonizing as it was, like slowly cutting into the wound to drain it.

“Briar,” he answered her softly, his tone unsteady still with grief after all these years. Yes, he’d obviously loved her. “Briar Wainwright. Her sister Hazelle was one of the ones Snow shot today. Her son Gale, well, maybe that was about Katniss, he was her friend, but…Hazelle, that was on me.”

She nodded at that, absorbing it. It was a while before he spoke again. “Did he ever marry, Rhus? There was no wife there with him.”

“Katrin. She died a few years back. Logging accident.” Drawing her knees up tighter to her chest, she told him, “He married down, so he must have loved her.” For someone on the cedar crews to marry down to trash pine, it was obviously love.

“Then he did the best possible thing for you by not telling you until then. And you did the best thing you could by chasing him off. It kept him safe because Snow didn’t know just how dear he was to you. He got to live a while longer. Marry a girl he loved. Briar never got that.”

She couldn’t deny the brutal, clean logic of that notion, even tangled up in a web of emotions as it was. “If he’d asked me, after Katrin…” She hated herself for saying it, for sounding so weak. “He wouldn’t have asked, though. Not with who I’d become then.” And after Finnick had rejected her too, maybe she wouldn’t have had the courage either. 

“Victor’s stipend still looks pretty damn good to someone in dire straits. You and I ain’t stupid enough to not realize a lot of people in the districts will overlook a lot for stability.” Yeah, that was true. There were bad marriages in Seven done in the name of security. He hesitated as if debating whether to say something and then apparently decided to push ahead. “I thought about going to Hazelle after her husband Jonas died down the mines. That was five and a half years back now. Three growing boys, another baby on the way, and I cost her sister her life. So I owed her. And of course, I couldn’t just leave constant charity on the doorstep.” Johanna was as familiar as he was with how trying to leave food or medicine or gifts for people led to visits from the Head Peacekeeper warning them to not try to change things, and undermine the Capitol’s stranglehold on them all. “Marrying her would have been the only way to be able to provide for them. And I imagine she was desperate enough right then she may have even accepted a lost cause like me—I mean, of course I would have promised her I’d never touch her.”

“So why didn’t you?” She had the feeling she already knew part of it. She hadn’t gone to Rhus because the shame was still too hot. But instead she said another part of it: “Was it about having to keep too many of the dirty little secrets of being a victor from her?” 

“Yeah, that, and four kids,” Haymitch said simply, the two last words each falling with the weight of stones dropped into the river. “Four kids with Twelve’s only mentor for their new stepdaddy, and Snow having a constant hard-on for keeping me in my place? The oldest boy—Gale—he was reaping age already. Posy, the one Hazelle was expecting then, wouldn’t have been safe from it for eighteen years. How long d’you think it would have been before at least one of them was drawn on Reaping Day? I dropped a few donations on their doorstep that could have come from any neighbor, but the kindest thing I could do for her and the kids was to stay the hell away. Obviously for Snow it wasn’t far enough.”

“Rhus had a kid,” she murmured. She’d met his daughter once, last winter in the winter town when she and Rhus ended up at the general store together. She’d bought a stick of candy, and to her gratitude, Rhus hadn’t told her to fuck off when she’d tried to hand it to the little girl, who’d clearly had Rhus’ eyes and sweet smile. “She’d be about three now. Belinda. He called her ‘Lindy’.”

“The kids weren’t there.” Now she heard there was some strength to Haymitch’s voice, moving away from grief and guilt to a problem he could wrap his mind around. “What the hell did he do with them?”

“Maybe he shot them off-camera,” she said bleakly. “People might have really rioted if they publicly shot crying toddlers.”

“Maybe. But I’m surprised he didn’t go ahead and execute the reaping-age kids right there. Not like people haven’t seen twenty-three teenagers killed on television every year. And he proved he’d kill under-eighteens outside the Games with Briar, my brother Ash, and your sister…”

“Heike,” she supplied, recognizing his hesitation was a prompt asking her for the name. She hadn’t said her sister’s name aloud in years. Nobody had asked. 

“Heike,” he acknowledged. “Hell, Ash wasn’t even quite reaping age yet. He wouldn’t have been until that October.” He sat up further now, arms draped loosely over his knees. “I don’t know what Snow’s doing with dozens of kids,” he said, now sounding tired and defeated again. “He’s got something planned, though. That’s a certainty.”

“We’d better focus on right here and now,” she cautioned him. “Getting through this.”

“Are you asking if I can handle it?” he shot back sharply, the prickly edge of temper now in his words.

“Can you?” she fired right back. “You’re a mess. _I’m_ a mess.” She was under no illusions that in the normal run of things, they would be spilling their guts to each other. But right now they both were apparently too tired, and too fucked up, to hide anymore. Apparently she’d been right to trust him, though, given he hadn’t turned on her to use it as a weapon.

“Then like I said on that hovercraft…I’ll help look out for you.” Gratitude swelling in her for him being willing to help cover for her, she tried to think of some way to say it that didn’t come across as too bitchy.

“Fine. Then I’m returning the favor.” When he started to speak up, she shook her head, cutting him off. “Oh, shut up, Haymitch. I’m _not Katniss._ I don’t need a daddy, or a mentor. You want to look after me, you do it as a friend, and that means I do it for you. You need it. We all know you’ll take up for anyone but yourself.”

“Actually, I was going to say ‘thanks’,” he told her dryly.

“Ah.” Now she was the one hesitating, cautiously choosing her words. “The withdrawal. Seriously, can you handle it?”

“I’ll manage. I feel like I’ve got a bad case of flu and it’s like I’m about fourteen again with the emotions. Everything’s a total damn overload. I about punched people back in Thirteen more than once.”

Yeah, she’d noticed his irritability during those meetings, but chalked it up to the stress and the lack of sleep. She nudged him lightly with her elbow. “Gonna start bawling at everything?” she teased him, trying to make light of it and make it something he could handle.

“Maybe,” he said dryly. “Lucky me that we have so many nice red bandanas handy.” He plucked at the one he wore. He’d been the first one to put one on his arm back at Southlands, mimicking her own armband, and then everyone else had followed.

“Good thought on the bandana armband.” She’d watched them as they stepped forward at the quartermaster’s and asked for a red bandana. It had made them feel like they belonged to something, that they chose to belong to this fight and stand with her to liberate their country.

He shrugged diffidently, as if the compliment was more than he could stand. “We’ve been around the Capitol enough to know that a little bit of theatrics can go a long way.”

“It’s overwhelming on me too,” she admitted to him. It was like she couldn’t bear to stop now that she was talking about it, and having someone actually listen and get what it was like. “I don’t know exactly what that lightning did, but…it fucked up something in my brain.”

“So…is it you feeling blue, or pissed off, or what?” His words sounded a bit stilted, as if he’d forgotten exactly how to ask someone about that kind of thing. Maybe he had.

“Oh, honey, I was always pissed off.” To his credit, he didn’t take the opportunity to get an easy shot in. “I forget things. It’s harder to focus. And…I’m worried more than anything.” She laughed grimly at herself. “Nothing specific I can point to, just this constant feeling that something bad is gonna happen. So if you’re like a teenager with your poor feelings all out of whack, I’m like a little kid seeing monsters everywhere. And when it’s something real, like a Peacekeeper with a cattle prod…” She felt the swell of loathing again at how she’d frozen up, mind starting to drift towards the darkness. “Thanks for saving my ass,” she muttered, trying to not automatically look away as she said it.

“Welcome.” He shifted a little bit, hands clasping now over his left knee, followed by a long exhalation. “Apparently I answered a question I was wondering all the months leading up to the Quell—once you’re blooded already, it gets easier to kill again.”

“It wasn’t easy in the arena,” she contradicted him. “I knew them. I may not have loved them, but…I knew them. Those Peacekeepers, we’ll never know their names. We’ll never have to go face their families and spin a line of bullshit for them. If it was…easier, that was a big part of it.” But she wasn’t being fully honest. Given how clear the air between them had been tonight already, without any harsh results to it, she was compelled to go on that way and admit it. “But yeah, you’re right. Getting up the nerve to take a life gets easier.”

“Hopefully not so easy we think nothing of it. Because then it’s too easy.”

“You didn’t look like you’ll forget that slaughterhouse anytime soon,” she challenged him. The way he’d looked in the moment it was all over, right before the cameras found them again—he’d looked haunted, like he was about to be sick.

“The smell,” he said gruffly, glancing away. “All that old blood worn into the entire place? No fresh water in my arena.” 

She’d been lucky in both the arenas that there was ample water to wash with—the thought of running around for weeks reeking of death made a rough shudder ripple its way down her spine. His sole request had been for a shower, and clean clothes, after the battle was all over. She’d wanted that too, but with him it seemed more like a _necessity_. Finally it struck her exactly how far he’d fallen, and how fast, that by the 70th Games he seemed to not really care whether or not he was clean.

“You gonna be able to handle this?”

“Have to. And I managed to lock down and get through it today. First time’s the toughest, now it’ll be …”

“Easier,” she finished, without any edge of mockery.

“Yep. Same with you and the electricity.” It felt good to hear at least one person believed she could manage it, when even her own heart doubted it slightly. She also didn’t doubt he would keep the secret for her. With any luck maybe Cressida hadn’t caught her less-than-stunning moment there on camera for Plutarch to see and complain about how unheroic it was.

Soon enough they’d have to go back to the campfire; find Dalton and Jackson and Drover and all the rest; start participating in the strategy of where their raiders would go. Nine, Ten, Eleven—the possibilities were many. Chances were they’d split into several groups. 

But for now, she was reluctant to leave this rare moment. It wasn’t anything mushy, pouring out their hearts to one another, or sobbing on each other’s shoulders. They’d been a little too matter-of-fact for that. But truth was that it had been so long since she had anybody she could really talk with that it was sweet relief to find that she could still open up, even a little bit, and have it acknowledged, understood, rather than simply being told to stuff it down as best she could. Thing had changed enough that there was more in the world than mere iron-forged endurance and finding whatever bad coping mechanisms were out there. She’d trusted him enough to lay down a few of her cards, and he’d repaid it in kind. It seemed like they'd both needed someone to heard their miserable confessions. 

Hearing about those he'd lost and who he'd been made her imagine him then, and it was a picture that was still hard to reconcile with the man she'd always known. The victor, the drunk, the whore—she'd never known him as anything else. He'd never needed to _be_ anything else. But she couldn't go back now and unlearn those facets of him. Besides, it felt good to finally openly admit all she'd lost, and that she grieved and raged still, to someone who got what it was like. She was tired of being the bitch, and maybe just plain tired, too tired to lie to herself, let alone him, and pretend she didn't need a thing and she hated or scorned everyone. She'd lost too much again for that.

It felt good to know that when it came down to it, he was more than someone thrown into the same shit-heap who sometimes looked after her in his gruff, snarky fashion. When it came to friendship, her bar had been set pretty damn low, because as he’d pointed out, they couldn’t expect much. But since that forcefield blew and the world opened up to new possibilities, he’d been there for her, backing her, looking out for her, rock steady and reliable. He’d supported, but not commanded; suggested, but also listened. He’d more than earned being her friend, a real friend.

The thought of going on television and admitting everything still scared the shit out of her even more than that cattle prod had. But some things couldn’t be hidden forever, and the more she hid from the truth, the more Snow would twist it. So she trusted him enough to turn to him and ask openly, “So how should this next propo against Snow go down?”

Once again he took his time answering. That told her he wasn’t glibly throwing her to the mutts. “I thought about it. It’s risky that it starts to look like it’s just you and Snow bickering with each other, directly accusing each other of being liars. You add a second voice saying the same thing, it becomes that much harder to deny it…so…I’ll help you.” He added, “Fuck knows I owe Snow, little pet example that I was,” but she could hear the trepidation in his voice. It made her feel better to know that the thought of it scared him too, and yet, he’d do it. Not simply out of strategy, she suspected—he wouldn’t leave her to endure it all herself.

She lightly nudged his knee with hers. “We’ll figure it out these next few days. Something that big shouldn’t be rushed, besides, Plutarch’s going to have the Battle of Southlands Station to turn into a propo already, so he'll be too busy to babysit us. We figure out how to say it…then we do it together,” she told him. She gave him a fierce smile that had made any number of Capitolites back down pissing themselves, but Haymitch was made of sterner stuff. He wouldn't back down or turn away. “And we burn Snow to the ground with it and then we piss on the ashes.”


	14. Chapter 14

The war almost ended that night, barely half a day after they’d landed at Southlands Station. It took hours of arguing and coaxing, mainly because the Thirteen soldiers were reluctant to relinquish authority to the Tens. Mentoring was apparently a better training ground than Haymitch could have thought—or maybe that training from Chantilly for how to turn the tables at least a little on being whored out, or both. Whatever had trained him to be able to talk people into doing something and halfway convince them it was their own idea, it came in handy here. It wasn’t about getting money for tributes, or getting them to keep their damn hands off him as much as possible while he fucked them. Still, he managed to keep some peace between the camps and at the end of the meeting everyone went to bed more or less happy. The Tens would act as the practical field “advisors”, while the Thirteens officially in overall command. 

Anyone who thought the entire nation acted as one was in for a giant headache, and when it was all said and done, he wanted a drink more than anything. The fact they’d had a flask going around earlier didn’t help, but only the thought that if he started drinking he wouldn’t stop, and that he’d have to endure the pain and discomfort of clearing it all out again when they got to Thirteen, gave him pause.

The talk with Johanna helped far more than the cigarette, but in the end, a small injection of morphling to ease his aches didn’t much hurt either.

Their war band split into three groups the next morning. Drover Crozier and Waumbaugh took a group heading out to continue starting more trouble in Ten on the poultry and hog farms far to the north, away from the vast stretches of cattle and sheep range. Harnai Mendoza, a powerfully built barrel of a woman who made any horse she sat look more like a pony, took Chang and her own group east towards the rice and citrus farms of western Eleven. As for himself and Johanna, and Dalton and Jackson who insisted on sticking with them, they would make the feint of heading west into the wheat and sorghum of southern Nine, when Snow would expect them to continue making a ruckus in Ten. _Besides,_ Johanna had argued, _oranges are fantastic, but we need to get some grain supplies first._

She was learning already, making the argument even before he’d needed to do it. Perhaps she’d always had that ability to think bigger, but she’d let it wither in her anger. It was coming in handy now. 

So they rode west with the rising sun at their backs, and it was another two days before they reached the Nine border. It was a full two days for all that, because Dalton insisted on putting them through their paces again, demanding more from them in terms of riding and marksmanship. Things kids in southern Ten learned over years were now being crammed down their throats as a necessity. But that was the way of it. If they couldn’t keep up, they’d be useless. Still, he found occasion to be thankful that they carried liniment in their saddlebags to deal with the soreness in his ass and thighs until he started to grow used to the pace of riding horseback. The morphling at night certainly helped. 

At least it gave him a distraction away from the discomfort of his still-protesting body. He kept throwing up several times a day, as his stomach apparently wasn’t used to handling so much solid food. Had he really eaten that little, in years and years? Apparently he hadn’t lacked for calories. Bright as the days were, it was an excuse to keep the sunglasses on until stopping at dusk, so that people wouldn’t see the pinpoint hemorrhages around his eyes, and the small bloodshot streaks in the whites, from the force of vomiting. 

They’d stopped at a water hole again as they got close to the Nine border—the Tens knew every water source for hundreds of miles, and seemed to have unerring direction to each. Humans and horses all gratefully drank their fill down, the people sighing with relief as they soaked their bandanas and tied them around their necks, letting the cooling water trickle down the open necks of their shirts. 

He’d puked again a few hours after a lunch in the saddle of hard biscuits, raisins, and jerky—damn heat and the constant motion of the horse beneath him never helped his stomach settle—making some excuse about a need to go take a piss for some privacy. Wanting to rinse the sour burn of bile out of his mouth once again, he wiped the back of his hand across his lips and startled to see a wet crimson streak.

The water was a poor mirror, slightly cloudy and rippling as it was—the sight of his reflection, blurred and dirty, seemed fitting. But the sight of his face badly reflected there with a smear of red on his lips and teeth, was terrifying enough. He reached down hastily and scooped up some water, swishing it through his mouth and spitting it out, not looking to see the red tinge of it, trying to blot the image from his mind.

Did his breath smell of blood, like Snow’s? If he walked up to Johanna right now, would she look at him with a single momentary flicker of revulsion and horror before she locked it down? She felt things too strongly, and she hadn’t been on the circuit long enough to truly learn to act rather than endure. She’d never gotten a handle on completely concealing things as well as some others. 

He thought about the years he’d spent chewing wintergreen candy to hide the smell of liquor whenever he went to go see a patron, or down to the shops or the Hob. He’d always bought it straight from the Capitol by the case, couldn’t stand to go into the sweet shop in the square still run by Maysilee’s parents Rab and Faydre, and then later by her younger brother Marten. The connection seemed too terrifyingly pitiless in that moment—him and his candy and Snow and his roses, both of them desperately trying to hide their sins and the resulting reek of ruin and corruption on their breath. 

He closed his eyes, telling himself, _I’m not Snow, I’m not Snow, I’ll never be him._ But the sight of the blood and the thought of wintergreen and roses haunted him as he walked back to camp. He desperately wanted a drink to drown it out, to the point that he hurt with the sheer desire in the way he hadn’t ached for a woman or anything else in years.

Glengarry, the medic, had anti-emetic on hand, and she bitched him out for not telling her that he’d been throwing up so constantly. “Men and their macho bullshit,” she muttered, as she gave him the dose of it. “You probably popped some small blood vessels in your throat from the strain of vomiting so much. Unless you’re throwing up a lot of blood, you’ll be fine, but don’t pull this crap with me. I _really_ don’t need you incapacitated through your own stupidity with hovercraft extraction close to a half-day away.” 

“Your concern’s so touching,” he said dryly, reminded of Lucius Sixleigh, the victors’ physician—there was that same brusque condescension of seeing people only as tools in some greater design, rather than genuine human pain and misery. Sixleigh had only ever seemed concerned about patching them up to send them back to their patrons, and pretending ignorance while doling out lectures about partying and rough sex. Haymitch was never sure if he really was that blind and just faking it, or which was worse.

They crossed the border unchallenged—Nine and Ten were both so large that it was almost impossible to consistently patrol the entire length of it. Chances were the Peacekeepers figured—and rightly so—that anyone missing from Nine would die out on the prairie for lack of supplies due to the slow pace on foot. The scrubby prairie grass gave way to farm fields, with tall green cornstalks or golden wheatstalks or even crops he didn’t know waving gently in the slight breeze.

Raised as he was in Twelve, able to look into the distance from anywhere in town and see how the swiftly rising humps of mountains bristling all prickleback with the green of thick forests cradled the valley, the vast open, flat expanse of the western prairie underneath the summer skies unnerved him. He felt all at once too exposed and too small.

Sleeping out in the open wasn’t easy either, because that feeling of exposure only redoubled when darkness fell and visibility dropped. They were entirely out in the open, defenseless in sleep, and he’d seen out on the Ten range that predators prowled in the night. Only the knowledge that there was a constant watch on soothed him a little. Tonight, though, faced with the inevitability of a fight in the morning, didn’t seem to help much.

It also didn’t help they’d shot a huge cat mutt that night, its mottled tawny fur and venomous fangs identified as a “prairie cat” by the locals. “No fear in these ones,” Dalton muttered darkly, prodding it with the toe of his riding boots. “Capitol-created to keep us from wandering out on our own, see. They never strike at the cattle or sheep—these ones are man-eaters.” Johanna looked at it oddly, muttered something about it being like Seven’s white-and-green stripd forest cats, and stalked away. 

They’d been such deceptively adorable little cat mutts in his arena, though they’d had wicked snake-like fangs. He could see now they were specially created for that too-beautiful arena, those cute miniatures of the lean, predatory grace of the prairie cats—right down to the nocturnal stalking habits and a taste for human blood. He shuddered roughly, remembering the screams in the darkness those first nights, tributes torn apart by an enemy he hadn’t even seen until the recap tapes, and him clutching the tree branch for dear life and hoping against hope that whatever was out there didn’t know how to climb.

So he was grateful it was his watch first. It wasn’t like he’d have been able to sleep right away anyway, hyperaware as he was now. Leaving them there with their torch, discussing just how big the prairie cat was compared to ones they’d seen in years before, he found Johanna out at the perimeter of camp, rifle slung across her knees as she watched out into the night, for either Peacekeepers or mutts.

“Not like in Seven,” she said, unprompted, as he settled down beside her. “Every night out at the logging camps there we’d set up a portable forcefield around the tents.”

“I reckon they’re not used to that,” he replied, “given they’ve usually got thousands of cattle or sheep along with them.”

She laughed, and it cracked painfully in the middle. “Mom would always warn us to go pee before they got the barrier up, because you could get out, but you couldn’t get back in.” Her fingers tightened on the rifle. “Bern would give Heike and me shit, tell us that the forest cats would get us, with our trousers down to boot.”

His mind cast back to the grieving rambles of a seventeen-year-old girl standing there, angry and terrified. “Well,” he answered her, “best to not go take a piss alone out there.”

“You wanna hold my hand while I do it?” she scoffed. “What’s got you so freaked out, anyway? You have your own little kitty murder-mutts in Twelve?”

“Nope. There’s an electric fence around the entire town. Guess they didn’t show you that pretty sight on your Tour.” She eyed him, that direct and level gaze that told him she had a bone in her teeth now and wouldn’t give up. “They shrunk those prairie cats down for my arena,” he told her bluntly, deciding it was better to just admit it rather than dance around it for ten minutes. “They released ‘em at night so we couldn’t sleep safely if we were alone.”

She nodded at that, and her look became more curiosity than a challenge. “Living inside a fence in Twelve, OK…you ever slept outside before? Arena doesn’t count.” No, the sky he’d looked up at in the arena had been no comfort. He couldn’t even tell himself that maybe Briar could step outside her house and be looking up at those same stars, and feel that tiny connection between the two of them. Like everything else, it was all bullshit and lies.

“Not until now.” Just one more thing on the pile of shit he had to deal with right now. Too bad Thirteen hadn’t simply passed him a bottle of sleep syrup. He suppressed a caustic laugh at that—so self-medication really was his answer to everything.

“Always loved it,” she said, glancing away, head ducking down as if in embarrassment or shyness. “Hot summer nights like this, we’d sleep outside the canvas, just throw our blankets down on the ground like we are now. You’d look up at the stars through the trees…” There was a tone of wistfulness and wonder in her voice as she said it, and he tried to imagine the girl she’d been then, not the teenager he’d met, determined and desperate and damaged; the child of Seven who’d stargazed out in the forests and had her older brother tease her about the monsters in the night that they could trust would be kept safely at bay.

He couldn’t even imagine a life like that. “People spend their lives buried miles deep in Twelve,” he said, hearing a rough edge to his voice. “So what good is the sky to the likes of us when we’ll never do better than crawl underground like some miserable ant?” Even out in the forest as a boy, checking traps or gathering herbs or berries, his mind was firmly on the essential task at hand, not dreamingly looking towards the sky. And that final spring with Briar, well, he’d had more immediate distraction with the feel of her lips on his. Besides, they’d always had to be home before dark because of the risk of wolves, cats, and bears out in the woods.

She didn’t answer him for a long time. “Yeah,” she said flatly, “guess you’re right.” Another silence fell and he stared out into the night, watching warily for any sign of motion, a shadow that seemed to move. “Finnick always liked to talk about the stars, how he’d sit on the roof of the deckhouse and stargaze, and how if the GPS went out, they learned to find their way by them.”

Now it finally clicked—her mother, her father, her sister and brother, her best friend. The vastness of this place and how exposed it was made him wary and vigilant—nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. There were no reminders for him of his losses, only of the arena. He couldn’t help a slight nostalgia for Maysilee and how she’d guarded his back in the dark terror of the night, and sitting here with Johanna keeping mutual watch reminded him of that in some sense. But the fear outweighed the grief. For her, though, maybe the empty expanse of prairie only seemed to only reinforce her loneliness, and serve to remind her of all the people she’d loved who had looked up at those stars and found them a comfort. It hit him with a curious pang to have finally run up against something where there was no immediate fellow-feeling between them. He couldn’t be Finnick, or Bern, or anyone else. But he could try, because he was no stranger to feeling alone even in a crowded room. 

“Well,” he told her, glancing upwards and trying to see that starry sky through her eyes, “I expect we’ll be sleeping rough a lot while this war is on. So let’s be careful on keeping watch, but…might as well tell me what you’ve got up there to look at. Sounds like our comrades-in-arms here use ‘em to find their way too. No trees to look for moss to find north, sadly.”

A soft, amused snort rewarded him for that—of course she’d know that old forest trick, probably learned it younger than he had. “We need to be looking up occasionally anyway for any hovercraft,” she agreed dryly, but he caught the faint ghost of a smile on her lips, and that told him that she recognized what he was trying to do, but she appreciated it rather than resented it. “All right. First lesson.” She pointed upwards towards a cluster of stars. 

He listened as she pointed and talked about the Seven Sisters, the Hunter, and the rest of them. He couldn’t help some gratitude that if only for a little while, the sense of constant wary tension seemed to roll back from her, and she simply talked—talked like she might have done those years ago, before the Games. 

But like all fine things, it had to end, and soon enough their watch concluded and they headed back to camp. His boots, the leather still stiff and dark and new, rubbed his heels uncomfortably, and he would have to slap a bandage over the blisters again before morning. 

They got their nightly medications from the medic. Johanna settled down on her bedroll, throwing her blanket over herself up to her shoulders and burrowing into it like a cocoon. Her greater dose of morphling knocked her right out, and before long the small twitches and fusses of restlessly trying to sleep gave way to even calm. 

He watched her for a moment, but for his part, he couldn’t sleep yet. With his saddle used as a pillow at the head of his bedroll, he dug in the saddlebags for the datapad and the secure phone. It was after 10 PM now and he hadn’t missed a call, so obviously Thirteen had nothing to report. Apparently there was no news from Ten or Eleven tonight either.

Pushing the power button on the datapad, he accessed the map, cursing softly as he tapped the screen. He was still learning to use the damn thing—not a tool that a Twelve kid, or even a mentor, had been trained on. Beetee and Wiress not only worked the thing like a charm in seconds, Beetee had very drolly informed Haymitch that they’d upgraded it while they were at it—in their spare time, between editing a damn propo. He wasn’t sure he could have felt more fucking useless than in that moment.

Well, the “Three special” button was one he wouldn’t forget for sure: the menacingly red “kill” in the upper right. If he tapped it and then confirmed it with a verbal of “phoenix”, would immediately fry the datapad. Of course, he’d quipped that he could simply try to smash the thing on the ground, but Beetee had taken it at face value and dryly pointed out it was built too tough for that. 

He stared at the map of Panem, the vast stretches of blank borderlands, the blips marking the exact location of towns, settlements, farms, and collectives. Their current position stood almost due east of “Collective II”, apparently dubbed “Sunnydale” by the locals. It was a large collective, tucked neatly into the southwestern edge of Ten. The map had astonished him with its detail, and no chance Thirteen had all those locations on hand. They’d worked quickly, based it on Lyme’s data from whatever shadow-figures she reported to in Two. Now that had been some news, and welcome for all that. He and Plutarch had been taking a stab in the dark at the situation in the districts and their mood and preparedness for rebellion. Those Peacekeeper spies out there fed far better information, and in this game—no, not a game—this situation, it would be knowledge that was power. 

He hadn’t been surprised to hear that two of the Peacekeepers who’d defected to the rebels from Southlands had been there on behalf of Two’s spymasters. No current Peacekeeper spies in “Sunnydale” as of New Year, though. Apparently the old one had rotated out and not managed to recruit a like-minded replacement. So they were on their own there. Still, the information Lyme had gotten Wiress to upload on similar collectives, and notes added by Clover, had helped.

He scrolled through it again: population 1128 as of Reaping Day, 372 households, all working the vast acres of cornfields that stretched for miles and miles. Right now they were sitting in land belonging to Sunnydale. He could look out and see the vast field nearby of sharp-edged blades of green cornstalks in neat, even rows, waving gently in the night breeze. They hadn’t seen anyone yet since entering Nine’s territory coming to tend the fields—no workers, no Peacekeepers. The thought of a place so large that parts of the work area were just left abandoned for days or weeks startled him. It couldn’t happen in Twelve. Clover’s notes explained that if they were lucky, the corn fields had taken their final spraying weeks ago and simply needed to wait to finish ripening until harvest. They’d be left alone, with any luck, while the farmers were in other parts of the collective tending to their soybeans and sorghum and other crops.

They’d raided the edge of the nearest field, trying to find some corn ears that looked ripe enough to roast in the evening fire. The Tens assured him it was a field of sweet corn and not feed corn, whatever that difference was. He’d never seen corn on the cob before—too messy for Capitol refinement—let alone eaten it. Cornmeal was part of their grain rations in Twelve, and he’d had a childhood of johnnycakes and cornbread, and apparently Ten was no different in that. It had been a relief to have something that tasted of home, even if it was cooked over an open campfire. But the treat of fresh-roasted corn seemed to buck up everyone’s spirits, and the gleeful defiance of having blatantly stolen Capitol property certainly added spice to it, as they all laughed and joked about their burned fingers from the piping-hot corn.

He stared at the map, reread the information: population, estimated Peacekeeper contingent, current disposition. _Guarded, but promising._ Read it over and over, trying to think of every possible angle. He ended up startling as Dalton plopped down on his own bedroll not five feet away and teased him, “Do you always read with your nose in the book, Haymitch?”

“Firelight is crappy lighting for reading, Dalton, if you hadn’t noticed,” he grumbled in protest, trying to not think of how Dalton saying it in that teasing tone reminded him of how Jonas and Burt and Briar used to yank at him for exactly the same thing. He’d heard things openly meant to mock so damn much that a virtual stranger teasing him in that light, jovial tone that included him rather than cut him actually caught him aback. Besides, Dalton called him by his first name. None of that Thirteen “surnames only” crap. 

Dalton chuckled and sprawled out on his bedroll, soon snoring gently. Haymitch sighed. No point obsessing about it further. It was like the Games—there was only so much that he could control, and far better to try to get what sleep he could, knowing there would be a fight come morning.

He glanced again at Clover’s final note, maybe the most important one of all, and the one that had made him advise them to go to Sunnydale first. _Worst collective in Nine in terms of conditions, death rates, etc. Still being punished for a would-be rebellion back in 34. We always called it “Hell-ective II”. If anyone in Nine will be most eager to fight back, it’s them._

He pushed the power button again to turn it off, wrapped the datapad in its protective sleeve, and put it back in his saddlebags. Settling down for the night, his right hand clutched the knife that he’d gotten from Ten’s supply, a good solid survival knife much like he’d used as a boy made for anything from cutting branches to skinning game, the weight of it solidly reassuring. But for a while, sleepless as ever, he tried to look up into the night sky rather than out into the darkness, and slowly, he reached for the knife sheath and slipped the blade back into the worn leather. Putting his head back again in the curve of the saddle, arms crossed over his chest, he watched the stars. 

Tomorrow would bring what it would bring. He could kill again if it came to it, and if he died, well, someone else could presumably fill his shoes easy enough. Strangely, there was a comfort now in the notion that those stars were distant and big enough, and so long-lived, that the fretful concerns of one man at one point in time didn’t amount to a damn thing in the grand scheme of it all. Even the Capitol didn’t figure, in the end. That calmed him in a way few things ever had.

~~~~~~~~~~

The dim lightbulb in the cool cinderblock cell never shut off, so there was never any concept of time. Meals, sleep, questions—it might have been broad daylight or the middle of the night so far as Niello knew.

For now, it was only questions. The same ones over and over—what did he know, where had the rebels gone, what was their plan? Peacekeepers with their white uniforms and expressions twisted with rage, but _always_ different ones. They tried to deny him even that tracking of routine.

Were he a younger man, and only worried about his own skin, he’d have rolled his eyes and smiled whenever they left him. Trying to play those clumsy fumbledick mind games with someone who’d been trained and tested from childhood in psychological tactics? It was laughable.

But he wasn’t thirty or alone. He was all of fifty-three now, and he felt the cool damp of the cell, and the hard metal of the slab of the shelf that passed for a bed, all the more strongly for it. And he was a man with a wife to protect, and two children that he feared for, children he didn’t know where the hell they were or if they were OK. They’d told him that they’d executed the families of the victors, and that might have been a lie, told to make him break. It might not. But he refused to let them see him break down over it. They’d be on him then like ants on a morsel of dropped food, ripping him apart piece by piece to bring him back as a prize back to their master.

They brought him to Snow, finally. He wasn’t surprised. Snow had always seen him as a favorite. The bright, golden boy from District One who’d won the first Games after Snow’s presidency began. He still remembered that brightly beaming face when Snow asked him into his office that first time, thirty-six years ago now. _You’re a symbol, Mister Dumas—Niello, do you mind if I call you Niello? The symbol of our dark history being left behind, of an era where the Games are an opportunity to lift a district child from poverty and ignorance and oppression, rather than an instrument of vengeance._

Of course, the fact that he’d been trained and prepared to expect brutality, the stories that Silk and Chela and the rest told him about a series of secret auctions where he’d be sold off to the highest bidder and left to bear the shame of it in silence, made it easier to bear. _They’ll expect your…availability. I can’t change everything overnight, of course. But I promise you, only those who’ll cherish your company and treat you with respect._

Suspicious and paranoid old man he might be now, but Snow was forty-one then, a man in his prime, charming and amiable. For all his training, Niello Dumas had been a boy of seventeen and unprepared to go up against that kind of a master. He’d bought it, and been grateful that it hadn’t been worse. It was only over the next ten, twenty years and seeing that in truth it never changed, if anything control of the victors ratcheted down tighter, that he realized it was all a lie and that Snow just slapped a concealing coat of gilt over the underlying shit. But being a favorite was valuable. It meant that unlike ones like Haymitch or Johanna, that Snow treated him respectfully, didn’t treat him like a dangerous wild cub that might bite if left unrestrained. 

He was counting on that even now, had planned it with Tilly when he sent her away with Haymitch. He only prayed that Snow’s slipping a few gears meant that the balance had finally tipped and that Niello could outplay him. He’d had three and a half decades of further practice, after all. That had to count for something.

Flanked on both sides by Peacekeepers, chained at the wrists and ankles, he trudged into Snow’s office. Snow looked up from his desk, the pale blue eyes regarding him with no expression at all.

He’d looked better. In the loose white pants and a white pullover top they’d given him, greasy-haired and unshaved for however long he’d been unable to bathe, shining gold hair long ago having steadily started to yield to silver and now definitely receding on the crown of his head, he wasn’t the bright golden boy of all those years ago.

But there was a chair set opposite the desk. That said enough. The ones Snow wanted discomforted were always made to stand there for lack of a chair. Carefully, with a rustling clack and jingle of the chains, he sat down. Snow didn’t offer to take the shackles off, though. “Leave us,” Snow told the Peacekeepers coolly. “I’ll send for you.”

Then Snow looked down from the dais where the imposing dark slab of that desk sat, like a lofty judge ready to dispense punishment. It was an obvious tactic, but it didn’t matter that Niello clearly recognized it, because it was one that nudged at whatever primal fear center any human had. “So here we are, Mister Dumas.”

Surname—not good. “Where are my children, sir?” he asked, raising his hands in a silent gesture of supplication, adding in the humble “sir” like a good boy. “Look, I really don’t care about—that bitch, you have to believe that I had _no_ idea—she’s always had such a thing for that damn hayseed and I told her over and over to think with her brain rather than her cunt—I mean, of course, do whatever you want with her, but…” 

He hated himself as he said those things about his own wife, but Chantilly would understand the necessity. She was One, like him, lived a life where everything was covered by a well-groomed lie that had to be maintained flawlessly. Even if Tilly had wanted him as more than a friend, that was something Haymitch would never been able to fathom. He’d broken hard under the strain in the end.

Snow put in a hand, palm outward, to halt Niello’s rambled protest. He leaned forward, his expression finally easing from the hard-carved lines like an ice sculpture. Now there was a glimmer again of that man from all those years ago. “No, I believe it’s very clear Mrs. Dumas—“

“ _Don’t call her that_ ,” he spat. Then he made his eyes go wide in horror, as if he realized that in his anger and distress, he’d just yelled at the president of Panem. “I’m sorry, sir, I’m…”

“Ms. Forbes. Of course.” Snow didn’t apologize himself. Of course he wouldn’t. “Ms. Forbes has very clearly made her choice.”

“She’s lied to me all these years,” he said bitterly. “I know we only married because it was for the good of the district and the Games, but…she made me start to believe…” Let Snow chew on that, use it to place any surveillance he might have of Niello and Chantilly, moments of genuine love or laughter. They’d always been so careful to never discuss anything risky inside the house.

“Then we’ve both been deceived by ones who spit on our generosity.” He saw Snow relax slightly, the tension in his shoulders easing. No, Niello wasn’t like Haymitch, someone to be feared and controlled. He was the good victor, the compliant one, always so reliable.

“Donny and Trina?” he asked again, afraid of the answer.

“No doubt you heard the rumors from your guards that the families of treasonous victors were executed.”

He willed his heart to keep beating, his spine to keep holding him up. “Yes. But…”

“I’m afraid your parents were among those executed—your older brother Tyrian and his family as well. You understand that I couldn’t be certain of your loyalty at that point, and that I couldn’t afford to make an exception of you that publicly as I waited to find out. After all, I’m well aware that for the victors in One, Two, and Four, their biological families aren’t as much of a concern to them, but the widespread example had to be made.” Another of those sharply watchful looks—how would the loyal servant react? 

He bowed his head in a show of contrition. His mom and dad had asked for none of this. He’d barely seen them in over forty years. Had they even been able to walk onto that stage, or had they been dragged? And Tyrian, a life ended simply because he shared blood with a suspected traitor. Well—so finally they all had something in common with Haymitch now. The bitterness and the guilt ate at him, raw and hot. But the training was more than firm enough to overcome anything personal roiling within him. A One’s mask would never crack where anyone could see. 

“Yes. I…I understand. You did only what had to be done. I…regret that they had to be sacrificed, but you’re right I wasn’t that close to them anymore.” Snow smiled slightly, apparently relieved to find someone who understood his plans and didn’t condemn. _You demented old bat, you’re finally losing it._ Anger and determination coiled even tighter within him, forming a hard knot that nothing would break.

He waited now. It wouldn’t do any good to plead with Snow about Donny and Trina. The man would answer, or not, in his own good time. And he wouldn’t be moved by groveling, as he was already well aware Niello was entirely under his power. “For the minor children of those families, they’re alive still—those between twelve and eighteen will next week hold a Hunger Games to replace the Quell that was interrupted. I believe your brother has a son, Cyan, in that age range.” Snow eyed him.

From victors to the children and kin of victors; it would make the same point. Nobody could escape punishment. But at this point, did it matter? The rebellion was out of control. They wouldn’t stop it simply because a few dozen more kids were dying on television. If anything that would just goad the rebels on further to make sure it wasn’t going to happen next year. 

Niello looked up at Snow and for the first time, he was genuinely afraid at what this implied. Had the paranoia, or the ravages of age, or both, finally gotten to him? Snow had never done anything without purpose before, but to make such a pointless spectacle, and so publicly—the man was like a mad dog now, an unpredictable danger. “Yes, Cyan is fourteen.” Cy was Ty’s youngest boy, and Niello had met him only a handful of times in his short life. Cy was apprenticed to a dyer. He’d never set foot in the Institute. And now he might well die, untrained, helpless. So this was how the dark horse districts must have felt, year after year, unable to do anything but get hit by the oncoming train.

“As for the children under twelve—your Sardonyx and Citrine included—I’ve sent them all to District Two. As other young children have done in the past, they’ll help atone for their family’s treason by eventually becoming Peacekeepers to help enforce the laws of this country.” Snow shrugged slightly. “I’m aware of your innocence, Niello, but they have a publicly known traitor for a mother, one with a price on her head. I can hardly ignore that.”

In that moment Niello eyed the contents of the desk, careful to keep his expression blank. A paperweight, a letter opener— _something_ that would let him kill the man. A victor, particularly one who’d been through the Institute and trained decades of further tributes himself, could kill with anything. But there was nothing. Snow had probably made sure of that. Younger than Snow by over twenty years as he was, Niello could still kill him with his bare hands, but likely not before the alarm went out. No, it was hopeless.

Raging murder inside, outward he kept himself to the appearance of a defeated man struggling to accept the inevitable. “So long as they’re alive,” he said, with his voice slightly husky. He didn’t have to fake that. So long as Donny and Trina were alive, there was a chance Tilly could get them back. There was a chance too that if Snow called him back for another chat, maybe that paperweight would be there next time, and Snow would trust such a good, obedient victor enough to let his guard down. All things might become possible with time. For now, he had to behave and say all the right things, and give Snow no excuse to think Niello’s children were better off as dead examples.

“Good. You’ll continue as a guest of the Capitol until this whole matter is settled.” So that meant the questions would probably stop, but Niello would keep on being a hostage. After all, he might be useful as leverage to Snow in some ways, and there was no certainty that Snow trusted him entirely.

Snow might be going slightly mad, but Snow’s emotional control was still sharp. He wasn’t nearly stupid enough to believe the rebellion was simply a handful of malcontents. The form of the Quarter Quell itself, and how it had been a risky maneuver to brutally beat the districts down from the brink of uprising, virtually assured that Snow was damn well aware just how bad things were out there. 

But in the end, even with hate seething within him as it was, wishing desperately that he could see Tilly and the kids one last time, Niello sat there and still had to admire that mask of utter self-possession in Snow. It would have done a One victor proud.


	15. Chapter 15

It was after their third battle that Johanna finally felt up to that damn propo. She and Haymitch had talked about it carefully for hours at camp each night, and over the last few days she’d gotten the sense that they were stalling now. 

Taking Collective V—she’d have to remember to call it “Morningstar” like the locals had quietly done in defiance of the Capitol’s designation—in the space of an hour made them all flush with victory. 

It didn’t hurt matters that this had been an easy one. The Peacekeeper mole there, Captain Persephone Dark, had managed to sway half their number to their cause before the “Phoenix’s Rangers” ever came in from the south with the mid-day sun. They’d ridden into the collective in a thundering, terrifying mass from the ripening wheat fields with their howls and war-cries, and within seconds it seemed like a bunch of Nine citizens picked up everything from crowbars to shucking knives and a group of Peacekeepers threw off their white uniform jackets and turned their rifles against the rest of the garrison. 

It helped they’d still possessed the element of surprise. Haymitch told her that Plutarch intended to broadcast their latest propo tonight, showing the battle yesterday morning in Sunnydale. The Thirteen hovercraft met them in a liberated Sunnydale, dropping off more weapons, more supplies, more soldiers. They’d stayed only a couple hours on the collective, picked up more eager volunteers to join the mounted rangers, and seeing several dozen others head out in their battered farm trucks with Thirteen rifles and Thirteen soldiers to try to liberate the next collective to the west, Bluffton. 

They’d ridden like hell late into the night to make it northeast towards Morningstar. After that propo aired, the success of the early raids might get people to take up arms, but it would also make the Peacekeepers and the Capitol crack down harder, particularly in Nine and Eleven. If there was ever a time to strike fast and spread the wildfire of rebellion in a hurry, it was now.

Things would be different by the time they got to Millersburg in the far north near the Seven border, the home of all Nine’s grain mills, plus the sugar and rice mills that handled Eleven’s raw products. That was like Southlands in scope, being essentially a large, densely populated town with thousands of people and a good complement of Peacekeepers—it wouldn’t yield easily to a few dozen raiders on horseback. Their plans would have to change there, as they would in most other districts.

But that was a matter for another time. Tonight, there was another victory, and much as she wanted to simply ride hard through the night to ignore her own restlessness, think about the next collective to take, that propo was right there.

She found Haymitch, chatting with their new Peacekeeper allies. “Sorry to interrupt the happy little buddy-making here, but we can pick that up at tonight’s campfire. We should get filming before the sun goes down,” she told him abruptly.

He didn’t have to ask what she meant. He simply looked at her, then he nodded, only the slightest motion. “I’ll get Cressida.” That was all he said, all he needed to say.

Cressida simply muttered, tapping her foot as she eyed the sunlight, and finally chose to put them outside one of the barns, on some hay bales meant for Ten’s animals outside one of the barns. Sunnydale’s barns were splintery and faded to a pinkish-grey, but Morningstar must have repainted recently, because the stood out stark and proud, like a flaming beacon as they’d rode in through the wheat fields. “As a backdrop, it’s a good visual reminder of people wearing ‘Phoenix red’,” Cressida explained. 

Sitting on a blanket so the hay wouldn’t prickle through her jeans, all she did was pull her hair back again from where it straggled in her eyes. She scratched her nose, relieved it wasn’t still peeling. Glancing over at Haymitch, she saw his skin had quickly darkened in these days of constant sun and weather to a ruddy bronze, covering up the odd, sickly yellow tinge he’d had. Dark and black-haired, he looked like a Four native now, except for those grey eyes. 

It surprised her to see how pale Twelve people really must be for sheer lack of sunlight—their natural olive skin hid it more readily. It startled her as well to realize how pale she’d gotten, more seeing her own skin burn and then peel before it deepened to the deep burnt-sugar gold that she’d claimed as a child, and saw constantly on the lumber crews around her. Had she really been so oblivious to how all that time in the house alone with no reason to go out meant her dull, dark ivory skin stood out, against the golden-skinned lumber crews and the raw umber of the artisans and merchants? That was just one more thing that screamed how much she wasn’t one of them anymore. 

She took in a deep breath, preparing herself, and he cocked his head slightly aside, as if in a question. Neither of them was polished for the cameras: chapped lips and skin weathered by sun and wind, wearing comfortable but slightly shabby clothes, worn now for several days straight. Every year the preps slathered hair remover on all the male mentors as part of their grooming, but she’d seen Haymitch looking stubbly on camera at the reapings, so after nearly a week without shaving, he was actually pretty scruffy. They both looked like they’d been living rough, dirty and tired. But before the nervousness of the inevitable finally coming down, she’d seen the difference slowly coming over him. It was subtle, and perhaps only someone who’d known him for a while would have noticed: the energy rather than lethargy, the first flickers of confidence and pride in the squared shoulders, the way he’d meet peoples’ eyes, and the lift of his chin. It was like, given a chance to take action, he’d eagerly seized it and in doing so, stopped silently apologizing for his continued existence.

She felt it too. Maybe she’d been angry rather than guilty, but even a few days of feeling like she could do something worthwhile, like she could actually _matter_ , and like she had a choice now rather than making the best of events forced on her, wrought its changes in her too. She only hoped it was enough to withstand this propo.

“Are you sure you don’t want to clean up?” Messala asked, fiddling with the camera and rolling his tongue up around his thick silver stud—it was an idle habit of his, and she surprised herself by not making the obvious remark about what it looked like when he did that, just to see him sweat. “This propo is going to be pure dynamite. We should let it have maximum impact.” The fact that they weren’t surprised when she’d let them know what this propo was about told her that the Capitol rebels already all knew about Snow’s activities as a pimp. She wasn’t sure whether that made it easier or harder for her, being aware that some people already knew all about it.

She looked at Haymitch, seeing from him how she must look too, for lack of a mirror. Haymitch looked back at her, and as scruffy as he was, that gaze was clearer and steadier and more certain than she’d ever seen, fog-grey eyes lacking the hazy distance and bloodshot whites of drunkenness and instead given the keenness of purpose. He shook his head, giving her a little wry smile and a roll of his eyes: _They just don’t get it, do they?_

“No.” She answered both Messala’s spoken question, and Haymitch’s silent one. She didn’t bother to explain to a Capitolite that the humble reality was better—that the artifice would only make her Snow’s creature again, the carefully polished little whore. Besides, she wasn’t supposed to be twirling in pretty dresses on the arm of Capitol assholes, or swanning around in a spotless uniform that had never seen a speck of blood. This was war, and people needed to see that she could endure the reality of the fight. “I’m done prettying the reality up.” 

Then she looked at the merciless lens of the camera, and instantly, the dark clouds gathered in her mind. The terror and anxiety welled up within her, fierce as a tornado trying to tear her apart. It was one thing to do these propos where she got to call Snow out, or go into battle, propos where she was strong and unassailable. This would be different. This propo meant being stripped bare, letting every single man, woman, and child in Panem know exactly how powerless she’d become, how much humiliation and abuse she’d endured. It meant admitting she’d been a victim. She suddenly couldn’t breathe, wishing desperately for a small hint of that morphling to calm her. 

She reached over and grabbed Haymitch’s hand, because it was below the sight of the camera. Praying he wouldn’t push her way—it wasn’t about messing with his precious hands-off attitude or even actually coming on to him. She couldn’t face this alone. That one small bit of contact might be enough to keep her from falling apart. 

To her everlasting gratitude, he kept hold of her hand. If anything, the hard pressure of his fingers told her that he was clinging to her for dear life as well, that he needed her every bit as much. Apparently even as low as they’d sunk, they still had a few final tatters of dignity to lose.

Cressida made the countdown, folding her fingers down one by one, and Johanna willed her face into some expression besides abject horror. “Let me start,” Haymitch muttered to her.

She squeezed his hand by way of reply, unable to force acknowledgment through her tight throat. He was giving her more time. She also had to admit that he had the right to speak up first. He’d endured it first, and longer. “They can do remarkable things in District Three these days,” Haymitch said, his voice rough-edged. “Including edit Games tapes—like the remarkable way I caught an axe thrown at me while holding my guts in with the other hand? I never did. I was on the ground going into shock just as she threw it, so I used the force field behind me—it ricocheted that axe back at the girl who threw it—Sapphire Lafitte. But our illustrious president couldn’t have you see a kid who managed to think around the Games. Wasn’t that I made them look stupid—other tributes have managed to turn things around to their advantage, and they got applauded for it. But you turn the walls of your prison into an actual weapon and change the outcome of things, might make everyone start to get some nasty ideas about how we could turn the whole system against the Capitol, right? So Snow noticed, and the broadcast was edited so none of you would know. And he couldn’t kill me for it—I was District Twelve’s only victor, enough fuss being made that we’d finally have a native mentor. Instead…”

His voice faltered for a moment. She pressed his hand harder. That seemed to make him sit up straighter, face the camera with a fresh glimmer of defiance that he unearthed from somewhere beneath the ashes of his pride. “Eleven days after I came back to Twelve, there was that ‘tragic accident’ where my ma, my little brother, and my girlfriend all died in a house fire. No accident. It was a lesson, that to challenge the Capitol and publicly circumvent the system meant being punished. But that wasn’t the end of it. I was still a threat, and now I had even more reason to be pissed off and defiant. But Snow has his ways of controlling victors.”

Hearing the pause, it took her a moment to see that he’d carefully handed it over to her. “He sells victors,” she said it bluntly as she could, figuring she’d get it over with before her courage failed. “He sells us to the people who have enough money, or enough clout that he wants them on his side, and so he could have more leverage over them with the knowledge of their weaknesses. Sometimes it was just being arm candy at a public event. A lot of times it meant sex. Our popularity varied. Some he could only sell once or twice as a fresh novelty and that was easy to keep secret. Some…some of us lasted longer than that and we had to pretend it was because we enjoyed being with Capitol lovers.” She thought of Finnick and it hurt like hell, as if the wound tore open all over again. “Because if we didn’t obey, and if we didn’t keep that secret, he’d hurt the people we loved. Haymitch’s family proved that to everyone. Snow used him as the example. Used to show all of us the tape of his Games, and show us pictures of his family.” She inhaled shakily. “So we took the threat seriously.”

“That was the punishment,” Haymitch took it up from her after a long pause. “To lose everyone I loved and still have to let Snow do what he wanted, to prove to me who had all the power. He threatened everyone around us—people we didn’t want hurt, even if they weren’t family. Some of the people he executed in District Twelve a few days ago, that was him carrying out a threat he made to me all those years ago. He threatened the entire district, because he knew we’d knuckle under rather than see more innocents hurt. So after that,” his voice suddenly went quiet, “it was…easier to not get close to anyone, not give him more people to hurt. Keep them safe that way.”

“He killed my family,” she said, now allowing the core of anger to seep back in, giving her a different strength than before. This wasn’t the desire to lash out and punish anyone to prove she could. “I panicked in the 66th Games when I heard my name at the reaping. I only got it together days into it after another tribute—Clark Saunders—tried to rape me in the arena. They edited that too, so it would look like I planned the whole thing and tried to _seduce_ him to get him close with his guard down, then I hacked him up and laughed.” Her entire body shook now with the force of rage and remembrance. “I was _screaming_ as I hit him with that axe, not laughing. But it was so much easier for them to sell me to the country as this vicious, deceptive slutty bitch planning the whole thing as an act than to admit the Games were a place kids went to die, and yeah, it was terrifying. So they did that, and when he asked to see me in his office next year and told me what was expected of me as a victor…after what almost happened in the arena, I lost it again. Screamed at him I would never do it, not even realizing it meant he’d kill them. He told me about that after they were dead. My mother, my father, my older brother and little sister—they died because Coriolanus Snow decided I was trouble and I needed a lesson.”

She couldn’t go on right them, having burned through all her rage right then. Haymitch must have sensed her trembling with rage and grief and stepped in again, his own voice still recovering its evenness and power. “He’ll deny it, of course, try to tell you we’re just spinning lies. But ask yourself: does this make sense of it, those victors that seemed to eagerly go Capitol and forget their districts, stay at a distance from everyone? The way my family, her family, conveniently died—that was national news. We can name names, details, all the dirty secrets that they told us in their bedrooms. That’s hard to deny. He just openly proved to each and every one of you a few days ago that he’ll execute any number of innocents that are close to the victors only to make a point. You’ve been lied to long enough, and told that the only worth your life has is what Snow’s system says: in sponsorships, in tesserae, in grain quota, in leverage to make a threat, in the price for selling yourself for a night to keep your kids from starving or your family from being murdered.”

Now it dawned on her—a way to try and cut herself free, not only from Snow’s lies but the strings of Plutarch’s expectations, the idolization from people. “Haymitch is right. So here Snow is again, playing his old tricks to reduce us to what our price is—so say someone out there is afraid enough to sell me or sell anyone else Snow tries to convince you is a danger. You think even if he executes all of us on television for all of you to see that it’ll stop the fact that he’s a monster and we finally have a chance to change things? Tell Snow and his ass-kissing lackeys that we can’t be bought and sold with fear or gold, not anymore, that we’re human beings with worth, not a price tag. But even if I end up dead, it doesn’t _matter_ , because you sure as hell aren’t thinking about fighting for me, and you shouldn’t be. You’re free men and women, and you can fight for your homes, your families, your districts, with all the heart and guts you’ve got…and that’s more powerful than threats and terror against me or anyone else, or a pocketful of money. Because the rebellion doesn’t belong to one person—it belongs to us all. And this time, Coriolanus Snow is going to hear us, and he’s going to fear us.” 

They sat there, watching the camera keep rolling, Johanna awkwardly trying to think what else Cressida wanted her to say that it hadn’t cut yet. But she felt like a punctured balloon, as if all her courage and her energy had leaked out of her in a steady gush and now she felt small and awkward and most of all, tired. Haymitch still held her hand.

Finally Cressida muttered, “Uh, cut, Sal,” to Messala, and the red light stopped blinking. With that, Haymitch let her go, and Johanna gratefully leaned forward, elbows on her knees and head down, fighting a sudden urge to throw up. “Great job you two,” Cressida said brightly, recovering her balance, “this one is going to be—“

“Shut up, Cressida,” Haymitch said, sounding like he was about a hundred years old. “Just please _go away_. All of you. Now.”

She didn’t even look up at the sound of feet against the hard-packed dirt telling her they left. She didn’t look at Haymitch, virtually forgetting that he was there without the pressure of his fingers in hers. Her world contracted to the one inside her, where her stomach churned too fiercely with the bitter brew of shame and relief, grief and anger, triumph and despair. She wondered if she’d set herself free with that propo, or simply destroyed what sharp and broken bits remained. There was nobody left that she loved—nobody to turn to, certain that they’d embrace her and comfort her, loving her just the same and telling her of their pride in her. She felt like a tree steadily chopped through, swaying and ready to fall, and in that moment she wanted her mother as she hadn’t in years, or maybe even Rhus with his naïve affection. Or even a bit of morphling or rotgut so that it wouldn’t hurt so damn much. 

Then she felt strong arms around her, careful ones, hesitantly waiting to see if it would be accepted. Instinctively, she reached out, wrapping her arms around him in turn, suddenly aware of him again and how he must be as alone and overwhelmed as her. He had assuaged her fears, long ago, with careful touches and kisses and calm words of guidance and reassurance. He’d given her wave after wave of physical pleasure until she forgot her terror, though the slight awkwardness and formality of their unfamiliarity remained. After that, he’d always been there for a drink and some bitching, that tacit understanding between them that they didn’t have to behave around each other.

But he hadn’t openly comforted her, that day or since, never simply reached out and held her like this, as one human being to another…as a friend. She pressed closer. How long since she’d been held? She didn’t even recall—too long. She’d thought of it as something weak, too soft, a threat to all her jagged edges that kept people safely away. Maybe it still was, but right now she’d desperately needed it, because now the world saw the soft belly underneath all those spines. 

Whether he’d reached out because he saw she needed it, or because of a blind desperation of his own, or both, she couldn’t tell. She didn’t want to ask. Did it really matter? Right then he held her as close as she held him, his cheek pressed against hers, his arms tightening around her. Obviously he’d needed this too. She wouldn’t turn her head, kiss him, offer to fuck him, and try to turn this into something her pride and her defensiveness could better accept, try to feel in control again as she felt like she was spinning wildly out. He’d see right through it, and probably he’d turn her down, push her away. The one person who would be a friend for her in this moment, empathizing and keeping quiet and not judging—no, she wouldn’t ruin it. Besides, he’d fucked her once and it hadn’t meant anything. This did. 

His rough stubble scratched against her cheek. He smelled like sweat and smoke and liniment, and that oddly acrid-sour note that he’d mumbled was something to do with getting the last of the booze out of his system. It didn’t matter. He was here and he gave a shit. 

Chances were, later they’d talk the whole thing over when they were more put together again, and try to predict what might happen. But right now, she simply let it be, let him be there for her and be there for him in turn, grateful that he wouldn’t think less of her for this.

~~~~~~~~~~

Even in District Thirteen, the propos aired, and these people were so damn robotic that they didn’t even let their hearts be moved enough to cheer or holler at the sight of their soldiers taking it to the Capitol. A few approving nods and then applause at the end, and that was it.

As a special treat, Coin let the victors up into the intel center for the last propo while Beetee and Wiress tried once again to hijack the network and broadcast it into everyone’s homes.

Johanna and Haymitch in the battle propos, along with the other prop fighting their way through Ten and Nine, but heroic fighting was different than seeing them face-to-face, even if through a camera—they looked sun-darkened, tired. But they fired the shot back, blew the lid off the victors being sold off. Snow wouldn’t be able to hide after this.

So Chaff sat there and watched. Snow didn’t respond to that propo, and Coin refused to tell them how things were going. Lyme passed on a few tidbits of information—apparently some dissidents in Five were screwing with the power grid to the Capitol and had been executed, and there had been a failed uprising in Six, and the successful start of one in northern Ten. 

It took everything he had in him to not start cheering when he saw the people in west Eleven, out in the rice fields and citrus groves and sugarcane fields, taking up the fight. He couldn’t say for sure, but he liked to think the cane field they showed might have been the one he’d been born to, the one where he learned to use the cane machete that saved his life in the arena, though not fast enough to get the venomous snake that nailed his hand. “Sugarland”, they called it—creative. That was the place where he’d grown, where he’d met Maizey. He’d tried to not think about May in years, not wanting to be disloyal to Zinnia. But now he thought of her: the lush curve of her lips, the dark blue-black luster of her skin, those wide, gorgeous near-black eyes. Her good and sweet heart, the way she’d made a man of him with how she talked him some sense, rather than his staying forever a clowning, joking boy. She was too good for him—too good for the shitty system they’d lived in.

He’d come from the cane fields, tall, solid, tight cables of muscle and little fat. Old Cotton had advised him to play strong and silent and imposing, which wasn’t easy for Chaff with his ready quips. But that was what they expected from Eleven—Thresh had been such a bright boy, but Chaff told him how to play the game. 

If the likes of Haymitch had gotten Capitol buyers excited at the thought of dabbling with a clever hick from poor, backwards Twelve, he’d have driven them wild. Mouth closed—except when they ordered it open---cock at the ready, a fuckable, brainless statute from savage Eleven. But they didn’t want a one-handed boy, his maiming so obvious. He’d seen their shudders of revulsion when he was at sponsor events. So he escaped that fate.

That didn’t matter, because Snow showed Chaff McCormick in the end that even if he couldn’t be whored out, he could be controlled. Maizey certainly would have lived through the yellow fever season if she’d gotten that medicine. He’d called Snow, begged, pleaded, promised anything. Been told that victors weren’t all that special, in the end, and Snow wouldn’t send a hovercraft with medicine for only one woman. 

_Then send it for everyone, they’re all dying here!_

_I don’t think you understand how the system works, Mister McCormick._

Oh, he’d been made to understand, and the hate curdled in him then, a tight lump where his heart used to be, and drinking his way through some of the next year helped some, but not nearly enough. It was only meeting Zinnia one day at the market that brought him back to life. Maybe he’d asked her too fast. But she’d been left alone with her whole family dead, a woman just turned eighteen and struggling mightily, and a victor for a husband meant she’d never want for anything. He thought all that winter over how damaged poor Haymitch Abernathy was already—a seventeen-year-old boy, everyone gone and closing himself off. He thought of Zee having to sell herself to Peacekeepers just to eat, of what they might do to her, and the image of a drugged-up Haymitch’s raw, bloody back and how he’d cried in Seeder’s arms, begging her to make it stop, rose to mind.

He’d married Zee a month before the 52nd Games. In truth, he’d needed her too. He couldn’t bear to be like Haymitch and swear he’d always be alone. 

Her dignity was so different from Maizey’s open gentleness. She’d come to love him quickly enough, and after the kids came, everything in his life seemed all right. Every year meant the Games again and a quick exit for Eleven, but coming home was a balm to that. Maybe Haymitch, young as he’d been, had been wise. Snow had showed Chaff again how little he meant, how little his people meant.

Zee. Rabe. He shut his eyes, but that didn’t erase the image of his wife and his firstborn, the red mist of blood and bone and brain. The two of them there on the stage, limp rag dolls surrounding by a scarlet halo, Rabe’s features a young, slightly rougher version of Zee’s elegantly high cheekbones, her pointed chin. He’d kissed that dimple of hers times beyond counting, her skin velvet-soft underneath his fingers. He’d never kiss it again.

Coin wouldn’t even ask about getting back the bodies. He’d at least been able to bury Maizey. He tried to not imagine what indignities they might have suffered, or Seeder’s body too after the arena. Or poor Amaranth Cooper from Nine, who he’d killed at the Cornucopia. He had no clue either what might have become of old shrewd half-deaf Cotton and poor Rice, who could barely keep it together at the best of times at any association with the Games—they’d had to dose him with morphling to even get him to sit there in Mentor Central to “mentor”. 

As for Chard, fourteen and with Chaff’s height, mischievous nature, and darker skin, and Farrow, the baby at eight, a miniature of her petite mother but with a softness that reminded him of May—he had no idea where they might be, or if they were alive. He could only pray desperately that he hadn’t lost his entire family in giving himself to this rebellion. 

No alcohol here either. He couldn’t drink the traditional toast to the dead, let alone try to drown his sorrows a bit. So he simply tried to walk in the world as little as he could in his mind, burying himself in older days, happier days. He tried to ignore the terror or every Reaping Day and instead thought on Zee’s slow laugh on a Sunday morning as he kissed her in their bed; Rabe’s first steps; Chardy dancing at the Autumn Fair and Chaff eyeing the boys that started to watch her; scooping a drowsy Farrow up in his arms and the sleepy way she’d smiled up at him, all innocence and trust.

He hadn’t kept them safe and that burned in him like the viper poison, all fiery agony. He wondered if it would be like his hand too and turn into something blackened, glistening and swollen with corruption. They’d cut off his hand. Too bad they couldn’t cut out his heart. Fuck this place, their schedules and their watchfulness. If he wanted to drink his sorrows up, or walk away and just quit it all, that ought to be his right.

One bit of gossip he’d got was that a person who could “no longer contribute” could sign forms and get a lethal dose of something. Better way to go than May, dying in agony over days and days, wasting away to nothing. Better than Zee’s execution. 

In Eleven, with its physical labor, they didn’t have that much use for a one-handed man. He’d seen crippled folk starve, or deliberately provoke or beg a Peacekeeper into shooting them by stealing something from the market. Instead, Thirteen had put him to work in the supply department, keeping inventory. He’d taught himself to write left-handed, and thirty years on, it was a neat script rather than the sloppy child-doodles it had been initially.

So he could “contribute”. He would have balked at the idea of having to ask their permission to die anyway, and making them do it for him. If he was going to off himself, it would be his death and by his terms, not anyone else’s. But until he knew what happened to Chardy and Farrow, he couldn’t quit, no matter how much it hurt. His girls were alive and still needed him, if there was any mercy at all in the world.

Sitting there for yet another bland and tasteless lunch, he was utterly alone. That was the really hellish thing, part of the reason he’d married Zinnia. But now he was alone, another wife gone, one kid dead, two missing. Clover and Blight understood the fear of a missing kid—now that was news to Chaff as well. But they had each other, and oddly, Blight had rallied in a way Chaff hadn’t seen in years, the two of them stepping in and trying to make sure the other victors were all right. Chantilly had two kids missing too, but she at least had hope Niello was alive. Annie had lost Mags and then Finnick, not a husband but close enough in terms of agony, and Chaff couldn’t help the gratitude that despite her grief, she tried her best to reach out to him, recognizing a kindred spirit. Funny thing they must be, the two of them always sitting across from each other at meals and respecting each other’s pain. But she couldn’t relate to the loss of children. Even if Haymitch had been here, someone who knew what it was like to lose everything—he’d suffered a child’s losses, not those of a man. 

Still, he tried for a spark of his old self, not wanting their pity. He stirred the thin, watery potatoes with his spoon. “So let’s guess, how many forms do we have to fill out to get some spices in here?”

Most of them chuckled gruffly. Annie, his fellow southerner, someone who understood what good food should taste like—she looked over at him and there was that flicker of feeling in her green eyes that told him once again that she understood and was sorry, without making him feel like she pandered to him. “Five, in triplicate,” Blight answered.

After they emptied the trays and Chaff prepared to head back to Supply and bury himself in more mind-numbing hours of numbers and lists, they were waylaid by one of Coin’s errand boys. “You’ve been excused from duties for the next hour. President Coin wants you in Command.”

At least Snow tried to couch it in false courtesies. Coin made it clear that it was a command. So they followed. Chaff prayed it was just another propo Haymitch and Johanna had sent. “Something opened up in the war?” Lyme asked hopefully.

“I haven’t been briefed on what she wants to discuss, Rathbone.”

“Wasn’t talking to you,” Lyme said dryly. But she seemed to realize that the rest of them were caught up in their own thoughts and fears, and fell silent.

Seated in the stiff-backed vinyl chairs up in Command, Coin wasted no time, as usual. “I have the duty to inform you of the deaths of the following relatives of this group: Cyan Dumas, Vair Donovan, Beryl Donovan, Patroclus Adebayo, Leander Adebayo, Silica Latier…” The list went on and on and there were gasps of shock again from the victors. When she got to District Eight, Chaff noted dully that Cecelia’s children Linsey and Lacey weren't listed, young as they were, but her son Lowell was. Just turned twelve, hadn't he? He wished she had been there now—he’d always liked Cecelia.

“Walnut Luongo,” Seeder’s granddaughter, finally he heard it, “Chard McCormick.” He tensed, shaking all over, waiting for the final blow, but there was no mention of Farrow. Coin continued on in her dry recitation, “Rory Hawthorne, Primrose Everdeen, and Bannick Mellark,” and with that, Peeta gave a sharp cry, looking on the verge of breaking down all over again. “That’s all.”

“All?” Wiress said, shaking her head, eyes wide. “Thirty-three children is a significant number!”

“We don’t need your fucking _statistics_ right now, Wiress!” Brutus exploded. “This is…this…what happened?” he demanded, looking ready to hit something.

He saw Annie busy comforting a weeping Peeta. He felt a hand on his shoulder and saw it was Blight. Part of him wanted to push the other man away, but the other part of him needed so badly to not be left outside of it all. 

“The broadcast happened last night. We intercepted it and began investigating.”

“Why were Wiress and I not called to help?” Beetee asked, his voice sharp.

“Your personal involvement meant that it was best to keep you out of the loop until we could make sure the information was correct. Apparently President Snow held another Hunger Games to replace the interrupted ones.”

“Games?” Annie said, shaking her head in confusion. “But—all the sponsorships, the interviews, none of that? Where did they have an arena?”

One silver-haired man in Coin’s retinue looked first at her, then at the victors. There was a glimmer of something human and sympathetic in his eyes. “We don’t have all the details yet. We didn’t even know it was going to happen. But they were in a canyon, presumably with the entrance blocked off, and given weapons, and told to fight. We can only assume there was some threat to make them fight.”

“Like the first Games,” Blight said bitterly. “No food, no water, no costumes, no interviews. No pretense. Just kids forced to kill kids to prove who’s in charge.”

He felt sick, imagining Chardy dumped in a desert canyon with a bunch of other children, expected to murder or die. He’d never see her face again with that bright smile, never hear her complain about all the little indignities of being a teenager, and never see her grow into womanhood. She’d died so alone, so forsaken, for something she’d never even chosen. Born during the 61st Games while he was away in the Capitol, now she'd died in the Games as well, while he wasn't there either. It seemed too cruel. _Baby, I’m so sorry…_ In that moment he wanted to be alone, to bawl his eyes out.

“I’m informed Margaret Undersee of District Twelve survived and is being presented as the ‘victor’ of the 75th Hunger Games.” Coin looked them over one last time. “There is no information yet about the children under the age of twelve. If any of you wish to view the broadcast, it will be made available to you during Reflection tonight here in Command.” He heard a choked laugh from somebody at the sick suggestion they’d want to watch it. “I’m already recalling Mason and Abernathy from District Nine. They’ve done all the good they can do there, and clearly, the war is entering another phase. That will be all. If you want to take the rest of this hour off your duties to speak to a counselor, they will be made available to you.”

"I'll get on the phone," Lyme said grimly. "See what information Two's network has."

Brusquely dismissed, Chaff forced himself to get up from the chair. Farrow was still alive. He had to focus on that fact—his baby girl was still alive out there somewhere. That would have to be enough to keep him going, for now.


	16. Chapter 16

She’d had to watch the executions. Although it seemed like it was far worse was the fact that they’d made her father read the proclamation. Some of the people in the square had to wonder why Jarron Undersee had read the proclamation before his death, and hearing him spout that cheap Capitol trash hadn’t helped. If Madge were more impulsive, she’d have yelled defiantly at them that he’d done the best he could for years for Twelve, tried to keep things going when it looked hopeless, pleading with the Capitol, nurturing that last bit of hope. If they’d heard him pleading on the telephone as Madge had ever since she was a little girl…but she wasn’t stupid enough to condemn him. No need for a mayor, though, when the Capitol's Peacekeeper thugs were there to take over.

The kids of the supposed “traitors” were kept at the back of the square, away from the cameras. But as her father walked by, not even acknowledging her, she’d seen the slump to his shoulders, the dull look on his face. He looked like an old man, spirit ravaged beyond all hope.

There had been no final words from either of her parents. There had been just the arrests in the middle of the night, loud voices and heavy boots stomping out in the hall. No answers to their questions. Something must have happened in the arena, but none of them could tell anything, and Head Thread wasn’t telling.

Maribelle Undersee went to it sober, though, and clear-eyed, and she knelt on the stage with a calm dignity, without Jarron's brokenness. Given how she drugged herself through every year’s Games, mumbling about her headaches, it lit a flicker of pride in Madge to see that, even as her heart twisted in horror.

 _Maysilee was the better of us girls,_ she’d slurred to Madge more than once, when her tongue was thick and her eyes dreamy and wide with morphling. _The strong one._ She never talked about the Games and exactly what happened, and the Capitol never reran footage of the losers of a Games. They didn’t run anything from the Second Quell at all, period, that Madge could recall throughout her childhood, so nobody really knew how Mister Abernathy won. But morphling habit or no, Maribelle Donner Undersee was strong enough to tell Madge about the Donners and to press that gold mockingjay pin from the Dark Days into her hand. She’d been strong enough to urge eleven-year-old Madge to go start practice with a knife, so easily concealed and so humdrum, where nobody could see her. She’d kissed Gale Hawthorne out at the slag heap once, and she’d liked it, and liked the fire in him to change things. But she’d spent many an afternoon out there with her schoolbooks and a knife, ready to drop the one and hurriedly pick up the other if anyone came near. 

Gale Hawthorne was dead too now, shot down at the same time as her parents—simultaneous executions, they’d wanted to get it over with in a hurry. Lots of things she’d never said and never asked, and never could now, because she’d sensed the conflict, the fact that he never could fully get over that burning-coal hatred of her as the mayor’s daughter, and a part of him hated that he wanted her. 

So it was the knife practice at the slag heap, rather than the kiss, that might be the saving of her now. It had been a series of windowless rooms and hovercraft rides ever since they made her, Primrose Everdeen, Rory Hawthorne, and Bannick Mellark file past all the bodies, walk through the puddles of blood, already getting sticky in the July sun. She’d looked, and seeing her mother’s beautiful face blown apart, those eyes wide and blank in a way that had nothing to do with morphling, seeing Gale’s fire guttered out, she’d sworn she wouldn’t give up.

When they bundled them onto a hovercraft again, Madge thought nothing of it. They were being transferred again, to where, she didn’t know. But while some of the other kids whispered nervously, and one of the youngest ones, Four by the look of them, cried for their family, she sat back in her seat and waited, watching.

They marched all of them down the ramp, into a blazing cauldron of heat, red sand underfoot. Were they in the deserts of Five? It was a desolate, barren place, and she hadn’t had anything to drink since before this hovercraft ride began, and she estimated that had been hours. Her tongue felt dry in her mouth. Forced to move forward into a canyon, now there were sheer cliffs of red stone rising alongside them in impossible heights without a good foot or handhold to be seen. 

They reached the end of the canyon, another wall of unyielding stone. “Well, folks,” one of the others said, a tall girl with Eleven’s deep brown skin, “looks like this is it.” Madge had never even heard the girl’s name. Anyone who’d tried to talk at all during those hovercraft rides got swiftly gagged and warned against further “conspiring.” So they’d all shut up, until now.

Madge shook her head, eyeing the wall of twenty Peacekeepers crowding in, keeping them penned there. “They could have shot us anywhere, anytime.” Why bother putting this much effort into it?

It didn’t take long to find out. The Peacekeepers stepped back, rifles still trained on the group of them. She watched as one of them pressed a button, and for a moment, something shimmered and rippled across the canyon mouth like throwing a stone into the pond at Victors’ Village, and she had a glimpse of neon blue lines crisscrossing in a honeycomb-like grid in the bone-dry desert air. Then it faded into nothingness. “It’s a force field,” the only Seven among them spoke up, a half-grown boy maybe thirteen at best with shaggy brown hair, and his round, lilting vowels were suddenly all the rounder in his obvious agitation, “with that and the canyon walls, they just penned us in.”

“Are they just holding us here…?” a dark-eyed, stocky boy asked in confusion.

“Shut up, Pat,” another boy told him. 

Suddenly the hovercraft descended from above, and opened its doors. The sky filled with a flurry of parachutes, their silver fabric so bright in the sunlight reflected back and forth on those red stone walls that it was nearly unbearable for Madge to watch.

Some parachutes fell faster than others—a huge sword taller than a man clattered to the ground near the Eleven girl, and a trident almost clocked the Four boy in the head as he stared up at it open-mouthed. Others drifted lazily down, borne by the much slighter weight of a slingshot, wire to make a garrote, or a dart gun. Bows everywhere, of bows of every length, almost as if to mock Katniss' failure to use that weapon to save herself.

It was weapons, all weapons, no food, no water, and no shelter—just like the Cornucopia a few days before. As she looked up, she could see on the faces of some of them that they got it, just as she did—the shock, horror, some of them giving way to a look of guilt or determination. It would be quick, because in this tiny holding pen, enclosed with rock on three sides and a force field on the fourth, and with the walls too sheer to climb the two hundred feet to freedom, there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. They were all filthy, their clothing ragged, they hadn’t been fed in some time and barely given enough water to survive on; some of them swayed on their feet already from fear or dehydration or likely both. 

Now she saw the small chinks in the rust-red rock of the canyon walls, and the eyes of the cameras there. Someone let out a cry of anguish even before the imperious voice came down from the hovercraft, telling them how it would be: a substitute Hunger Games, with the families of victors instead to answer the terms of the Quell card. Only once the annual contract of the Games was once again fulfilled could the districts expect to receive mercy. There would be no food, no water, no sponsors, and no escape, and if they didn’t do their duty and fight, more people would die instead. The announcement concluded with the ever ironic, “May the odds be ever in your favor.” 

This time there was no pretense, and no pageantry. She never saw who picked up the first weapon, but as she lunged for the knife that had landed mere feet away, she saw the first to die was the young Four boy, struggling desperately to get the trident loose from its parachute.

There was no question in her mind—she wanted to live. She would pay the price for it later. Even as she told herself that, part of her mind told her how stupid she was to believe she’d survive. Katniss, for all her deadly skill with the bow, hadn’t even made the final eight. Who was she? A silly girl who bought strawberries and saw the way a Seam boy looked at her with a heat in his grey eyes— _useless, spoiled merchie brat._ A girl who’d talked to him about rebellion, but heard the scorn of _You don’t know what hardship it_ in his words. 

Gale was the one who hadn’t known anything, in the end. Her Aunt Maysilee had shown them all that a merchant girl could survive in the Games, almost until the end. Her Donner ancestors had died for the rebellion—her mother now too. Rebellion wasn’t about Katniss Everdeen or that gold mockingjay pin. It was about the personal determination to not give in to fear and tyranny. She wouldn’t go quietly; her ma often said Madge was more like Maysilee. But that meant taking the lives of kid as innocent as her. She wouldn’t get out of this with unstained hands. Even the kids who looked like they were from the Career districts looked as helpless as the rest of them, fumbling with parachutes and weapons. Apparently they hadn’t been trained.

In that moment, she swore that if she got out of this alive, she would learn all the names of the kids stuck in this tiny canyon of death, and she would give them the respect they deserved. 

It wasn’t the same at all as fighting shadow-opponents out at the slag heap. The resistance of blade on bone surprised her, and the fetid smell of the breath of a big One girl, teeth unbrushed for as long as Madge’s, as the force of Madge’s stab drove all the air of out her. It was so close, so immediate. She watched the life fading from those green eyes in pain and terror, and knew in her heart that she would never forget it.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly, already turning to face the next potential threat, trying to not slip on the treacherous footing of the soft sand underfoot. But her eyes stayed dry. Maybe she didn’t have enough water in her for tears right then.

Mind numb to feeling or emotion, she kept fighting, until finally she turned and turned, and saw nobody else left standing. The crumpled heaps lay there, surrounded by wetly shimmering blood that the dry sands soaked up thirstily even as she watched, their natural red darkening.

She pressed her left hand to a deep wound in her shoulder, but the blood ran down her right arm in sticky tendrils, mingling with her sweat and falling from her fingertips in fat droplets like the blood rain in the Quell arena a few weeks ago. 

A wash of strangely cool air flowed over her skin, and her world darkened as the vast shadow overhead blocked out the unbearable white-hot sun. The hovercraft had waited. They’d been right—it hadn’t taken long. 

When she woke next, the heat and bright sun of the desert was replaced by the dim, cool dampness of cinderblock walls, a narrow cell barely seven paces long by five wide. It had a toilet that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years, an equally disgusting sink with a sliver of soap, a half-empty roll of toilet paper, and a hard metal shelf without a pillow or a blanket. But her eyes went back again and again to the chair in the middle of the room—metal, bolted to the floor, and fitted with numerous leather straps across the back, arms, and legs. She curled up on the sleeping-shelf, knees drawn up to her chest, and stared at that chair, and wondered when they would use it on her.

They didn’t come quickly, though. They shoved trays of food through the narrow slot in her door and said nothing. The lights never went out. She didn’t hear anything except the occasional tapping that might have been the water pipes or her imagination. She slept, she ate, she slept again, and sometimes it was hard to tell whether she was asleep, awake, or halfway in between in some twilight of reality.

She couldn’t forget the scorching heat, the shimmer of blood in the sun—their faces, their screams. It was potent enough even to overpower the memory of her ma’s execution. So this was what being a victor meant. This was what Aunt Maysilee had almost been, what Mister Abernathy was. What Katniss and Peeta became too. She gritted her teeth, and started to run through everything she could to keep her mind occupied—playing the piano in her mind, mathematical equations, recipes, songs from her childhood. The stories her ma told her on her good days, about the defiant pride of the Donners back in the Dark Days. Rebellion was in her blood, and with any luck, they’d started a new rebellion out there. Whether she lived or died, she wouldn’t give in to them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Johanna saw by the glances that while their raiders obviously hadn’t watched the propo on television while roaming the plains of Nine that word got around. There were some awkward looks, some pitying ones, some confused ones, some brimming with a rage that she could tell wasn’t directed at her and Haymitch. That first morning after was too much. She’d fired an irritated “Yeah, they killed my family and forced me into fucking, got a problem with it?” at one hapless Nine man who’d stared at her a little too long while they saddled the horses. His dark brown eyes went wide, and he gave her an awkward smile of apology. Seeing people back off in a hurry, she realized that Bitch Johanna was still alive and well in their minds. Trouble was, now Bitch Johanna co-existed in those minds along with Phoenix Johanna, Forced Whore Johanna, Slut Johanna, Poor Little Orphan Johanna, Axe Killer Johanna, Scared Tribute Johanna, and who the hell knew what others.

They didn’t know quite what to make of her. Well, they weren’t alone in that. She’d had all those things rattling around in her brain for years and hadn’t figured it out. Unfortunately, she couldn’t scare them off or tell them to go to hell. There was no escape from it in solitude. All in all, the hard living of the war path and riding for the next collective gave her an excuse to not think about it too much, and that was a better thing.

There was stiffer resistance at Meadowbrook Collective, but they’d expected it thanks to the nightly data input from Thirteen. A larger farm with a valuable crop consisting mostly of soybeans, the stubby knee-high soybean plants didn’t cover their approach nearly as well as the high cornstalks, or even the relatively tall shoots of wheat. Plus the pricey crop meant more Peacekeepers, and they had the warning of having seen Plutarch’s propos and being aware of raiders at work in Nine. Not to mention she wouldn’t be surprised if Snow hadn’t upped the price on her head, and Haymitch’s, after they blew the lid off that little nasty can of worms, so there was more pressure to capture them. 

Still, by this point their tactics were coming together. The Ten ranchers were once again invaluable in their ability to both ride and shoot, horseback tactics causing chaos and keeping the Peacekeepers off guard and pinned down. That meant the Thirteen soldiers on foot took point in capturing the place systematically, going building by building, their army of soldiers with guns once again joined by a swell of locals with farm implements and some Peacekeeper deserters—including the quartermaster with control of the local armory.

As quickly as they arrived, they resupplied, sent more of the farmers on to other collectives to start the fight there, took on a few new people game to join the raiders. Mahal Chenery from Ten and Haylee Washburn from Nine had been injured worse than just treatment with morphling, sutures, and bandages, so they were made comfortable for evac back to Thirteen. Better odds than they’d had down at Sunnydale, where they’d lost four and then had two die later of their injuries. Johanna watched old friends say goodbye to the two injured fighters, seeing the bloody bandages on Mahal’s badly shattered knee and Haylee’s wounded shoulder, and gave them her own farewells. “Been good riding with you,” Mahal said, offering her a hand.

Surprised, she took his hand, looked at him, and didn’t see the pity or even the hero worship in his eyes, and not even a flicker of lust. Maybe Mahal actually saw her, and that startled and unsettled her.

They got on their horses and vanished back onto the prairie, zigzagging west into the setting sun, intending to ride a few more hours before making camp. Haymitch took his usual place riding to her left.

Fingers tightening on the reins, she glanced over at him, riding that rangy black gelding he favored most. The bitchy instincts alive and well in her quipped, _They’re two of a kind._ It was a remark she’d have made to his face only a few weeks ago. But not now. Sure, they still freely snarked at each other and tried to outdo each other in the quips, but somehow, the thought of saying something deliberately meant to cut him where she knew he was defenseless seemed like a petty cruelty.

She’d had her share of time to think about that hug after the propo. Normally, she’d have been certain of what it was all about—people usually didn’t try to get cuddly without the motive of wanting a fuck, especially not men. If that was the case it would have all made sense. She’d offer to fuck him and so she’d set the terms, she’d control the situation, and she’d keep him in his place. 

The whole point of fucking was power. Testing them and seeing they were weak, simply wanting to get their rocks off and use her to do it. She wasn’t really a person to them—what they wanted, in the end, was what was between her legs. Once she proved that, she could safely make the sex about nothing more than her body as a weapon, hold them in contempt, and in doing so, hold them at arm’s length.

But he didn’t want to fuck her, and she’d been certain of that. That meant it was something else, and lying awake that night, and in idle hours since, she’d figured some of it out. He’d been a friend to her that night when she told him about Rhus, about all the losses. 

Nobody touched her since her family died, in a way that wasn’t about sex, or violence, or the basic sterile courtesy of a handshake. She’d forgotten what that was like, simply to be held and comforted, for no other reason than she’d needed it, a move without demand or expectation or ulterior motive. 

He’d unbent enough from his own isolation and fear, a man who had so little to begin still giving of himself like that. She understood full well what it cost him to set aside his own precious armor of solitude. But obviously he’d been as starved for a kind touch as her. She’d opened herself to him a bit and instead of using that weakness to hurt her, he’d instead been there for her even more tonight. Strange to say, she’d felt moved to respond in kind, to reach out to him. He’d made her feel safe, and like a friend he valued, not a potential screw, an obligation for the war, or a broken annoyance he put up with because they were equally mouthy and she was also, quite conveniently, the only equally fucked-up victor he could find. 

And she found her eyes straying to him again. It wasn’t in a sexually speculative way. No switch suddenly flipped that made her linger on the breadth of his shoulders or the angle of that stubbly jaw, wondering what he’d look like naked and trying him mentally on as a lover. Haymitch was still Haymitch, but now he was just… _more_. She looked at Haymitch like Mahal had looked at her lying on his hospital pallet, as if something familiar unexpectedly took on a new shape, as if she hadn’t quite seen him before and now had to rethink it all and figure the truth of him out. She looked too, wondering if she could find an excuse to touch him, or invite him to touch her, in a way that had nothing to do with leaving her shirt open a button too far and waving her tits under his nose. 

Something between them had shifted, in a way that couldn’t be undone. He was more to her than a drinking buddy she could bitch to, and far more than a meaningless screw. She’d let him see more of herself in her need, and he’d reached out to her, and opened himself to her and taken comfort from her in turn. This felt like the first real test of that bond put in place that night by the cottonwood, and he’d been an even truer friend rather than running away or keeping her safely distant. She couldn’t forget that, and how it sparked a tiny but persistent glow of warmth within her that seemed more sustaining that the fierce fires of rage—maybe, just maybe, there was a chance he wouldn’t turn away or let her down in the end.

At the campfire that night, the mood was fine enough, and with having settled into their routine, there was no need for the intense strategic discussions for hours. Instead, one of the women from Southlands produced a fiddle and started to play, her leather-tough hands oddly nimble. Johanna sat back on her bedroll and listened, couldn’t help a smile. The music was unfamiliar to her, sprightly distinct leaping notes like the continuous thunder of hooves rather than the sinuous, flowing notes she’d heard as a child, and the wide-open farmlands were still too unlike the spreading shelter of the trees. But fiddle music, people dancing and clapping around a summer campfire—that was familiar, and it tugged at her with a wistful nostalgia.

She found Haymitch, staring at the dancers too with that wistful curl of a half-smile on his lips, arms folded. “They know how to have a good time, huh?”

“Not even pulling out the booze,” he said, the smile turning to his familiar smirk. “Though they tell me it ain’t a wedding down in Southlands without a keg of something.” It made her wonder what it had been like for him in childhood—had there been dances around the firelight too?

“We would crack open the spruce beer. Weddings were almost always around Harvest Festival time in the fall when we were all together in the winter town, but before the first snows made us all want to stay tucked up indoors. Unless it was a ‘tick tock nine month clock’ marriage, you know,” she said, with a raised eyebrow. “But those were always smaller, quicker weddings anyway.”

“Summertime weddings for Twelve were the common ones, usually a flurry of them right after the Games. The eighteen-year-olds all in a hurry to get hitched, of course, and on the whole, I think they—“

“They?”

“We,” he still said it hesitantly, like carefully lifting a bandage from a wound to see if it still bled. “I think something happier,” well, that was one way of avoiding the matter altogether, “was needed for everyone to get past how bad the Games were, every year. There was always a bottle or two of berry wine opened. For a little sweetness, you know, to start the marriage off right. Chaff tells me they do fruit wine for weddings down in Eleven too—maybe Twelve got it from them back before the Dark Days.” He shrugged swiftly. “Most other to-dos, folks would put up a barrel of hard cider if they could.”

He of all people would have wanted to try to bury the sorrows freshly carved into him once again, wanted to forget. But she didn’t have to ask where he’d been on all those summer nights, when people in Twelve danced and drank berry wine. She’d spent her own autumn nights alone in her house, glad that the Glade was distant enough that the sounds of laughter and joy and music couldn’t reach her. “When’s the last time you went to one?”

“Oh, are we actually having a heartfelt conversation here, Johanna, or are you just trying to feel better knowing it’s been a lot longer for me?”  
“Fuck you, Haymitch, then go kiss up to a fucking bottle like you always do. We all know you prefer that to a woman anyway.” Awkward enough to admit it, but he’d thrown out a remark she’d have made to him, or others, in the past, and it was no easy thing to be on the receiving end of that stinging scorn. It was instinctive to lash out in turn, but the satisfaction of having won wasn’t there. Instead she cringed inside. ”I…shit.”

He shook his head, looking tired and frustrated. “Sorry. It’s…” She nodded, not wanting to watch him fumble to say it. The phantoms of an old life flickered in the firelight, balanced on that edge between nostalgia and grief. If she’d missed plenty back in Seven, he’d missed even more in Twelve. “Delilah Hawthorne and Fredderick Griffiths,” he finally offered, hesitantly. “Their wedding was after the 51st Games. My last hurrah before I realized they were all better off if I stayed the hell away from them. I was the fiddler.”

“You?” She tried to imagine him, young and playing a fiddle, but the insidious reality crept in. He’d played that wedding, but even then, the barrier must have been there between them and him, even as it had for her after the 67th. Dead family, dead tributes, whored out, all the secrets and pain that had to stay locked inside.

“I needed something to do to keep the house from being too quiet,” he said with a curt, angrily hurt edge to his voice.

That certainly struck a chord within her—the silence had been almost unbearable. “I just kept the television on all day for the noise.” She laughed softly but harshly. “Can’t tell you how many times I watched the entire ‘Splendor’ marathon that first autumn just so I wouldn’t have to go out. You probably took the better part of that—I could feel my brain dying by inches.”

“Nah. You probably did. Hours and hours of practice and in the end there was nobody at all to play for—that’s kind of a pathetic waste.” That cynical smile and the empty look in his eyes practically screamed the words he didn’t have to say out loud, because she could tell they were in his mind: _Like the rest of me._

Whatever thoughts she might have had after that were interrupted by the sudden frantic beeping of the comm-link. Haymitch lunged clumsily for his saddlebags and came out holding the sleek black device. His face lit from beneath by the golden glow of it, planes of his features cast in alternating light and shadow that seemed to throw the lines into deeper relief, it put her in mind of how he’d looked that first afternoon on the hovercraft—sallow, exhausted. His eyebrows rose abruptly and he looked up at her, a hardness in his eyes. “There’s a hovercraft coming to, and I quote, ‘extract’ us and return us to Thirteen. They’re five minutes out.”

“No details?”

“No,” he said, already tucking the comm-link back into his bags and hauling up from his knees with a slight grunt of effort. “Five minutes out and this is the first we hear, and they’re warning us as a courtesy so we don’t worry it’s Capitol when that hovercraft appears? Think for a minute. You tell me what that means.”

Realization hit swiftly. “It’s serious that they’re pulling us out early, and they didn’t want to tell us hours ago so we could argue our way out of it before they got here.”

“Very good,” he said, and as opposed to the usual edge of barbed mockery, it sounded sincere.

She looked around her, at the people she’d fought with over this past week, people she’d started to know and to like. People that had her back in the fight, and started to make jokes with her around the fire and over their brief lunches. Now Thirteen crooked a finger and expected her to abandon them, and it pissed her off. “If they think they can treat me like I’m their little…”

“They can.” He shook his head impatiently, rolling up his blanket. “Their resources, Johanna. You may be the Phoenix, the people want to see, but we ain’t getting anywhere without Thirteen guns, Thirteen hovercraft, Thirteen soldiers.” He smirked without any humor. “Think of them as our sponsors for the war. So yes, we have to play nice.”

She didn’t have much to pack, and she left her bedroll and horses and the like for someone else to use. The farewells were rushed, and she had no answers to their questions—she was leaving in a hurry, on unspecified orders, and only hoped they didn’t see her as Thirteen’s pet, trained to return on command, or that she didn’t give a shit. But to her surprise, they took it well, thanked her for giving things a start, and told her they hoped it was nothing serious. “Dalton’s in command,” she reminded them, giving the man a handshake and a wish for luck.

Dalton looked at her as the whine of the hovercraft engines announced its descent, and some of the horses whickered and stomped nervously at the noise. He gripped her hand tighter, leaning in to be heard over the roar of the engines. “Tell Haymitch this—you two, be careful back there. You’re not victors there. Even if you’re the Phoenix, you’ll be an ordinary Thirteen citizen. It’s all equal there, that’s how it runs so smooth. So don’t be like a nail head that sticks out and fucks the whole thing up. You’ll probably get more from President Coin by being agreeable.”

She almost snorted derisively and said that if they wanted someone who could play agreeable, they should have stuck with Peeta Mellark, or Finnick, or any number of others. But she nodded, taking that in. She’d tell Haymitch later, when they could have a quiet word—the fact that Dalton warned her gave her the chilling sensation that it was important. Coin hadn’t exactly come across as warm and fuzzy, that was for sure.

A silver-haired man, one of the staff she’d seen at Coin’s side back in Thirteen, strode down the ramp. Just for a moment, Johanna swore he looked past her and Haymitch, to the open stretches of the plains, with a wistful look that made him look as if he was lost in some kind of nostalgia or memory. Then those pale blue eyes snapped back to the two of them, to this time and place. “Colonel Corriden Boggs,” he said. “President Coin sent me to help bring you back. I’ll explain the situation and answer any questions, but if you don’t mind, I’ll do it once we’re in the air.” Not much to do with that brisk statement except nod and follow him. Haymitch was too much an old hand at concealing things to let his worry show openly, but she would bet it was there all the same. They both had to dread what the news might be that Coin pulled them out in such a damn hurry.

~~~~~~~~~~

At that point, Plutarch would have done most anything for some coffee. District Thirteen had certainly gotten more rigid in thirty years, since an eighteen-year-old Paul Himmelsbach had left to start his mission of infiltrating the Games command. It meant rewriting his life anew: new name, forged papers, forged database entries, living with another long-term Capitol spy, a teacher who claimed him as a nephew. He’d earned his way into the Games Academy by acing their entrance exams, charming them at the interviews, to the point where it hadn’t mattered that he was supposedly an orphan with a background of no particular merit. They were the _People’s_ Games, and thus even the poorest Capitolite child whose parents couldn’t scrape together the coins for even a tiny sponsorship pool in their neighborhood or workplace could someday aspire to be a part of the glory and glamour.

In thirty years, he’d learned many things, and risen right to the top of the Games. He’d also apparently become addicted to his coffee, and so finding out that this new president’s orders had banned all stimulating substances still gave him some woe. Of course when she looked at him with those cool, nearly colorless eyes and uttered the condemning words, “Have you forgotten your mission and become truly Capitol, _Heavensbee_?” that was enough to warn him. The fact she used his Capitol name, which felt more like his identity by this point than the one he’d been born to, felt like an accusation.

And here he thought he’d finished his share of dealing with the sharply barbed expectations of presidents when he left Coriolanus Snow in the Games Center. True, he’d heard Coin’s name after her election twenty-five years ago, shortly before the Second Quell, and her demands for information had always been more pointed than Randall’s. More than a mere mentor aide could reasonably be expected to find, really. But all the rigid changes to District Thirteen—no, he hadn’t expected those. They caught him aback.

It was nice to have Effie Trinket, of all people. True, she struck him as being very like a bewildered rabbit in a nest of hawks, thrown out of her depth. And more than once she’d made some careless remark that made people around her feel free to criticize her, and remind her that she’d been a part of the Games, and a willing one. He couldn’t argue that. She’d been a small cog, but part of the machine nonetheless.

Still, if they’d had their way, they would have chained her up in some cold cell for it. So instead he’d tried to make use of her. Scrubbed, minus her wig, dressed in drab grey, she looked like a moth rather than a riotous butterfly like she’d been before. But it seemed she liked the fellow-feeling of having him there as well, someone who loathed the drabness and banality of it all, whose mind chafed at accepting this place in all its sameness. Coffee, humor, colors and excitement and _fun_ instead of the quiet boredom that now was District Thirteen—the Capitol hadn’t corrupted his soul, but Plutarch could guiltily admit that maybe the sheer possibilities of it had shaped his heart a bit.

They sat and silently watched the footage from the latest “Hunger Games” to see what could be mined for a propo. The shortest Games Plutarch had ever seen were the 65th, when it was clear from the very start that Finnick Odair walked in virtually assured a victor, wanting for absolutely nothing, and claimed the crown in four days. Even then, the fickle Capitol crowds who had left every other tribute in the cold for sponsorships complained those Games were too short.

The 76th Games, such as they were, lasted only a matter of minutes, shorter even than the average Cornucopia melee. The editing was a rush job—here and there, the screams and cries for mercy remained intact. That would never have stood in Central Command for the broadcast release. Or perhaps the editing had been utterly deliberate, and those terrified faces and choked death rattles were meant as a message to the people of Panem. Plutarch had spent the better part of three decades in Central Command—all the tricks of what got scrubbed before the broadcast were well known to him. Death was sanitized, made safe and dramatic for the audiences. Crying children were simply erased as much as possible, or like Johanna Mason, spun into something safer.

At the end, a lone figure stood among the heap of dead bodies, her blond hair falling in her stunned blue eyes, golden hair now streaked with strawberry red. “Let this be a lesson to all traitors and rebels,” Claudius Templesmith intoned dramatically. “Turn back, bring peace again to Panem, or death and destruction are what await you.” The tape abruptly ended there. 

He heard a soft whimper next to him and looked over to see Effie biting her knuckle, chest heaving in and out, eyes wide. Her dishwater brown hair straggled loose from its tidy bun, but she didn’t even seem to notice. “That…” Her voice cracked. “That was…” She looked like a woman who’d looked into hell.

“That was the Games,” he said simply. It was what they’d always been, beneath the gloss and the glitter and the carefully edited lies. She’d obviously seen doomed children up close every year in Twelve on the train ride and not had it crack the shell of her utter ignorance, but obviously there had been cracks there this year, that this propo punctured through the façade and reduced it to brittle shards. He suspected having to watch Katniss Everdeen die had put the final, fatal flaw in it—a victor was supposed to be a god-like hero, a survivor of the trials of the arena, not a girl who suddenly died with her throat torn out simply because she tripped over a root. “That’s what’s always been the heart of them.”

Effie shook her head. “First Katniss, and now…” She inhaled deeply, looking as if she wanted to vomit. “That poor girl there in that canyon. That poor, poor girl,” she whispered, looking down at her hands.

“Those poor thirty-two others, you mean,” there came a voice from behind them, a voice whose sharp anger seemed strangely at odds with the softly lilting tones of Seven, and Plutarch turned in his chair. He smelled the two of them before he saw them, actually. They reeked of sweat and dust, standing there unwashed and scruffy, wearing clothes that looked like they needed a good soak before even being washed. Any self-respecting Capitolite probably would have burned them. They must have come here right from the hovercraft sent to retrieve them.

He looked first at Johanna, seeing the fire burning in her eyes as she saw the image of Madge Undersee standing there, the only living thing in a desolate, bloody canyon of corpses, knife still clutched in her hand. “Oh, for stupid…the look on both your faces right now. Don’t get it, do you? You always liked to forget the dead ones and focus on the victors as soon as it was over,” Johanna continued with a smile that was more like a baring of teeth. “Cry a bit over them on the Victory Tour as a big show, but not a damn one of them was a person. A whack of dead kids chewed up by the Hunger Games is too much a slice of reality, huh? I doubt either of you could name one tribute that died in my Games. Maybe not even my final kill.”

Rack his brains as he might, she was right. He’d never focused on the dead ones, only the future potential of the rebellion. “I’ll name you two—Wex Bassler and Moirainn Trosser,” Haymitch piped up, a faint look of cynical amusement on his face as he glanced over at Johanna.

“Of course you can’t forget them,” Johanna shot back at him with a lifted eyebrow. “ _We_ remember,” she said, a defiant tilt to her chin. “They,” chin jerked to indicate Plutarch and Effie, “don’t.”

He stared at her, the idea crystallizing in his mind with sudden clarity. “You’re brilliant.”

Now the anger was replaced by a look of utter confusion. “Huh?”

“’We Remember’,” he repeated, trying it out. “Featuring…unsuccessful—“

“Dead,” Johanna cut in, relentlessly persisting, shaking her head. “Murdered.”

“Murdered,” he said the word, sensing Johanna was right in using the shocking rawness of it, “tributes from the Games. Their stories.”

“Well,” Haymitch said sarcastically, “you’ve got,” he pressed his lips together tightly in thought, obviously working the numbers, “something like eighteen hundred dead to pick from at this point. That there ought to keep you busy for a good piece.”

In the silence that followed, now he did look at Haymitch. Johanna stood there with a new confidence, and a quieter air of determination than the one of tense rage he’d always sensed around her. But the bigger change was wrought in Haymitch. Unkempt and unwashed and tired-looking—that was nothing new to anyone who’d seen Haymitch on television the last few years. But this wasn’t the same man at all as the drunk wreck he’d become. His rumpled state was from toil rather than hopelessness. Oh, the same lines were in his face, lines of years of unhappiness and strain and dead hopes. But those lines had eased, and it wasn’t simply the deep, ruddy bronzing of his skin he’d gotten. He stood straighter, met eyes with his own, spoke up in a way that wasn’t dismissive sarcasm. Those eyes too—sharp, shrewd, intent. 

Plutarch had watched Haymitch in the slaughterhouse battle. That propo had needed some editing to cut out the hesitations and the like by both Haymitch and Johanna. But he’d charged right into the fight, and though the first knife strokes were a bit clumsy, they were decisive, and soon the instincts came back. Every propo since then showed the man was a victor still, able and ready to fight. Even now, the untucked blue checkered shirt was rucked up slightly over Haymitch’s right hip to expose the hilt of a knife on his belt, and it looked as much a natural part of the man as his coal-black hair, and those keen eyes spoke of the man’s even more formidable weapon: his mind.

This was the man Coriolanus Snow had feared would come from a snarky, too-clever teenaged boy, tempered in the forge of the arena. The man that it seemed Alma Coin had hoped would grow from that boy, given how she’d demanded detailed reports from Plutarch those first years after the 50th, and then abruptly lost interest in Haymitch when Plutarch finally had to admit Haymitch had no interest in defiance. 

Maybe that man had been delayed, buried for years beneath sorrow, guilt, isolation, becoming a sexual plaything, and finally alcohol, but apparently Snow hadn’t succeeded in ruining him entirely. That man stood in front of Plutarch now, a little broken and careworn, but alight with a cool fire of purpose, capable of waging war with both body and mind. Plus, perhaps the only man who could readily keep Johanna Mason’s excesses reined in by commanding her respect. Plutarch saw it, and he couldn’t help but smile. Between Haymitch’s cunning and Johanna’s fierceness, perhaps they really had something here. “Yes,” he said, nodding to Johanna, “I think you’re right. We’ll start taping the ‘We Remember’ propos tomorrow morning.” He glanced over at Effie. “Will you help me?”

She looked at him like a drowning woman thrown a lifeline. She obviously recognized the chance for penance. Maybe she recognized it would scar her deeper, drive home her own complicity and failures all the more harshly. “I’ll think about it,” she murmured quietly, eyes flicking aside in an expression of shame.

Johanna’s derisive snort seemed to echo through the room. “Shit or get out from behind the crap-bush, lady—time to pick your side. If you’re with us, you’re involved, and you’ve got a lot of ground to make up.”

“I think President Coin wanted to see you,” Plutarch told her. That was the trouble with Johanna—they had to be careful because that sharp blade of truth could cut both ways. She could still as easily turn on a would-be ally as an enemy with those scathing remarks. She’d done an admirable job in the propos, particularly that last one, but hopefully Haymitch could manage her.

“Oh, I’m sure,” Johanna said dryly. “C’mon, Haymitch, let’s go report to Mom.”

“I’ll come along,” Plutarch said. “We’d better discuss the status of things and where plans go from here. This last move from Snow was a gross misstep, and we should seize that opportunity.” 

He followed them out the door and turned slightly, seeing Effie sit there, staring at the screen still. Probably the best thing for now was to give her some time to ponder things over, without badgering. So he said nothing, simply turned back and left her to her privacy.


	17. Chapter 17

Sitting across the conference table from Coin once again, staring at the bleak sterility of Thirteen, Haymitch had to admit he hadn’t much missed either. The last week or so had been a wild revelation, out on the prairie and fighting back against the Capitol, answerable to no master, only mutually agreed upon aims and defense of each other in their war band.

It had been a brief period of the endless vista of the gently nodding grasses or grains, blue skies so bright they almost hurt to look at them. Smoky campfires, sore muscles and blisters, sunburn; sleeping rough and eating tough jerky in the saddle. Blood and combat, but the certainty that while they might not adore him, the others that rode with him would have his back in the fight, rather than being forced to abandon or kill him in the end.

Those days had tasted like the closest to freedom he had experienced since he was a child—perhaps even more so than those days, because he hadn’t kept in line and accepted hardships purely for fear of the Capitol. What privations he’d endured had been by his own choice, as opposed to here where they would be all by the orders and mandates of District Thirteen.

He felt like he was being stuffed back into a cage, ostensibly “for his safety”. But even the most gilded cage of victordom that the Capitol could devise was still cold metal bars. He could only back in with far more reluctance for having seen that freedom, and he wouldn’t be able to surrender it with perfect grace. He’d been as close to a free man as he’d ever been, and so Alma Coin sitting there ready to lay out whatever terms sat ill with him.

“Well,” Coin spoke up finally, her head swiveling slightly to stare at Johanna, sitting to Haymitch’s left. “Your little gambit of trying to abdicate your role as the Phoenix was quite interesting.”

Johanna shook her head irritably. “I was trying to do it to keep the rebellion going if I ever get captured or killed.” He sensed that wasn’t the whole truth. She’d spoken some about how ill at ease she was with the mantle of expectations, and the image people painted of her as some kind of shiny heroine now, desperate to believe in something.

“She’s right. We were worried,” he agreed, “that the entire thing had fallen apart because Katniss died in the arena.” His fingers instinctively worried the mockingjay pin, still in his pocket—he couldn’t seem to be without it now as his own personal talisman of penance and remembrance. “It was a smart play.”

“Fortunately,” Plutarch said, a smile flickering into existence on his face even as creases of worry still etched his brow, “it was a very successful gambit. If anything, the people have responded even more positively to you because of it, and because of the propo…”

“Yeah,” Johanna cut him off abruptly, obviously not wanting to discuss that propo. Haymitch couldn’t blame her on that score. He could still so easily recall the feel of her in his arms, the warmth and strength of her body as she clung to him, her breath a ragged sound in his ear. He had simply reacted to the need in her that answered the bottomless gulf within him, hadn’t even allowed a chance to imagine all the ways it was a terrible idea. To find that she reached for him with the same intensity of feeling—it meant everything to him. More than sex ever had, because it was being touched by someone for no other reason than his fear and his pain actually mattered to her—that _he_ mattered to her—and she wanted to help comfort them away. He’d certainly likewise given her more of himself in that gesture than he had in fucking her. 

She’d held him in return, without mockery or judgment or awkwardness or pity, simply letting the moment be, and no need for explanations or justification. He couldn’t stop thinking about it, wanting to touch her again, finding himself thinking of excuses to make it happen. Crazy old man, that one simple hug could shatter him so completely. Like a kicked-around dog who’d cling like a shadow to the first person to show him a kindness. Pathetic, pathetic—but he couldn’t help it. 

“Obviously Snow is stepping up his game,” Coin went on. “We recalled you here early because it was…unexpected.”

“Old man’s finally lost it,” Johanna said dryly, “and he’s burning down the whole house to kill a few flies.” Not the most elegant analogy, but it sufficed. Snow definitely had lost his edge that he was so openly using naked force and threats, risking losing everything by it.

“Therefore, any further deployments into the districts are going to be very carefully controlled, and limited.” Coin eyed the two of them. “That means no more week-long jaunts into unknown situations.” _So much for freedom_ , Haymitch thought with a sigh, almost sensing the door of the cage slam shut.

Plutarch nodded in agreement. “Especially with your propo being so well-received, we can’t risk losing you to a lucky strike by Snow, Johanna, especially not in this early stage of things with so many of the districts still in the balance.”

“So that means,” Johanna said slowly, leaning forward and folding her hands on the table, “we’re staying here in Thirteen and getting sent out only for good camera opportunities?” She gave a snort fairly ringing with derision. “Bullshit. They’ll see right through it if I’m arriving just in time for the mop-up, waving an axe and yelling defiant slogans. They want to see people fighting for their freedom.”

Coin leaned in as well, and from the glimmer of interest in her eyes, Haymitch recognized they’d entered the bargaining phase of things. He nudged Johanna’s knee with his own beneath the table, hoping she got the message to let him work with her here. “Well, Phoenix, it seems the war needs you. So let’s talk about your terms. We’ll try to get you into combat. You’ll only go into situations where we have good intelligence and a solid extraction plan.”

“Fair,” he had to acknowledge.

“Haymitch goes with me,” Johanna insisted. “We work better together.”

“Very well.” Coin acquiesced surprisingly easily on that point. “Before I deploy you again, I expect certain standards for you to work seamlessly with Thirteen’s soldiers. So you both need more training.” Her tone was blunt and dark as an uncut face of coal. “Your use of rifles was sloppy at best due to what little rifle training you had, for example. Your tactics also need work. While you may have gotten by in the arena on your current skills, this is no longer the Hunger Games.”

“No shit?” Johanna said with a lazy air of sarcasm.

He shot her a look, but on this, he would hold mostly silent unless necessary. These were her terms, not his. He couldn’t speak for her on this.

She got the message. “I want time on the surface…every day. Me and Haymitch both.” Her mouth hardened into a stubborn line. “Any of the other victors that wants it too.”

It was Plutarch who protested. “But the security measures—on the surface, plus you could always be injured or killed up there by the wildlife. No, I’m afraid that’s just self-indulgence talking.”

“It’s not self-indulgence,” Johanna burst out angrily, “it’s going to keep me from going fucking crazy being buried here in this tin can.” 

Seeing the two of them stare at each other; tall, slender, and cool Coin and Johanna, short, round, and tense, he figured now might be the point to try to say something. Coin wasn’t arguing it, interestingly enough. “You wanted us to get more practice. Fine. We’ll get some more rifle practice by hunting—there’s woods up there, right?”

“Yes, there are woods not too far distant from the ruins of the former surface buildings.”

“Good. That’s better training than firing at stationary targets or whatever you had in mind. Plus I imagine we can sharpen some forest tactics for whenever we take back Seven.”

Coin stared at him with those intense eyes of hers, but nodded slightly. “You have a point. Only those undergoing training will be allowed out. Anything you bring back in terms of game or other food goes to the communal kitchen, though. And if radar picks up an enemy hovercraft inbound, you won’t be allowed out. You’ll carry a commlink and a tracker anklet at all times so you can be retrieved in a hurry if need be. You’ll have two hours each day, taken off your expected afternoon training time. You’ll stay within a one-mile radius from the access hatch and if radioed to be told you’re going out of bounds, you’ll return.”

“Good.” Johanna looked pleased with that, and he breathed a mental sigh of relief. He could withstand living here—maybe—if the cage door were opened for a couple hours a day.

“But in addition, while we’re on the topic of mental health, you’re also going to attend regular sessions with our psychiatrist,” Coin said. “And you will cooperate with him in full. He’s clearly an addict,” she nodded to Haymitch, “and you’ve had what we might term ‘impulse control issues.’ I need you both to be reliable and mentally sound, and counseling is a resource that will help that.”

He hadn’t expected her to pounce with that one, and it was on the tip of his tongue to tell her to go to hell. He couldn’t bear the thought of dredging up the details of every dark and bloody part of himself for some stranger to turn over and examine at length, to _judge_. As if he needed to be told he was a fucked-up mess. But looking at Coin he saw she wasn’t going to flinch.

He looked over at Johanna, easily recreating the picture of her beside him under that cottonwood, too tired to hide from each other how screwed up they really were. Brittle and broken things the Capitol had cracked in the arena and then stomped on further by leaving them with nobody to care for the wounds, finally abandoned entirely when the last of the bright sheen finally wore off and the dark, twisted, and thorny parts beneath finally stood clear and undeniable.

He’d done his best to manage it for years and years, and that wasn’t enough. She understood him, reached out to him, and might be able to square her shoulders again to take on some of his pain, as he could for her, but they’d buckled under their individual loads. The two of them weren’t enough to rescue each other, and he didn’t want to become her burden. _I need help._ It humiliated him to admit it, stupid as it was given how very public his disgraces had become, how he lived with the daily shame of his own uselessness and failure. Irrationally, it felt like another low that he could sink to, but maybe it was better to give the burden of it to a dispassionate shrink he could eventually cut loose. Far better keeping it clinical and professional duty than to draw someone else into it, corrupt them in their compassion with the guilty weight of his reality. 

Johanna’s eyes went wide, and he saw her draw in a deep breath, sensing the coming protest. But surprisingly, she sat back in her chair, folded her hands and nodded. “Agreed,” she said, though the word still rasped out of her like it was reluctantly torn from her throat. So she must have had the same thoughts as him.

“Good,” Coin said. “Your other terms?”

“The victors taken captive, and the kids related to the victors—the ones too young for reaping age. Whatever the Capitol makes them do to stay alive, they get immunity for it. And we have to rescue them.”

“I’m willing to overlook some actions as forced. However, if we’re talking extreme acts of treason or counterrevolutionary measures that significantly hamper our war effort, those will be judged by a criminal tribunal.”

Johanna mulled that over and gave a curt nod. “So how about rescuing them so that doesn’t happen?” she said with impatience. “We’ve got all those Peacekeeper spies, they’ve almost gotta know where they are.”

“The victors are in the Capitol, of course,” Coin said calmly. “As for the children, they appear to have been moved between locations these last few weeks—the intelligence Rathbone reports on them apparently has some gaps. As for a rescue effort, it will be undertaken only if the cost is deemed not too high.” She shook her head. “I’m not sending my troops to storm the Capitol unprepared to rescue a handful of your friends, or sending them to where those children aren’t.” 

_My_ troops—was there a slightly possessive air there, like when Snow had used to say _my_ victors? Or was Haymitch only imagining it? “So it comes down to whether or not a rescue effort benefits the war effort, does it?” he said, trying his best to keep his bitterness out of his tone. For all they’d said that lives to the Capitol only had value rather than worth, it seemed things didn’t operate that much differently here.

“It would be a genuinely powerful propo,” Plutarch said thoughtfully, “and a grave blow to the Capitol. But I agree that this kind of thing will need to be carefully planned with all the best possible intelligence. Especially with taking on the Detention Center in the Capitol, we’ll only get one shot at it, because it’s going to mess up some of our spy network there. Covers will certainly be blown, and some spies may die or be executed if I can’t get them extracted in time. I’m not willing to risk them willy-nilly right now. It’s a fool’s errand.”

He had to admit that was fair as an objective assessment, even as the coldness of it chafed at him. But then, Plutarch had been more than willing to deliberately throw twenty-three victors right into the jaws of his fucking death-trap simply for the sake of a chance for Katniss to live. He’d gambled hard with Katniss’ life too, and he’d lost, and coolly jumped ship to Johanna with nary a qualm for the lost life of one more teenage girl. 

“I suppose,” he said, trying his best to take another tack and feigning agreement, trying to lure them in and get some kind of commitment out of them, “that giving the Capitol time to sit back on its heels and think we’ve abandoned them will have them lowering their guard as well.” Trying desperately to think ahead, he glanced at Plutarch, all seeming casualness now. “There’s no way in hell this thing ends in a couple of months, and war effort’s going to need to slow down in the winter anyway, ain’t it? Nobody’s really going to want to fight hard battles from town to town, or lay a siege, in that kind of weather. We’ll all be sitting back on our heels a bit, spinning our plans for spring.”

Coin nodded briskly. “Correct.”

“Perfect time for a raid then, when they’re all snug and cozy for the winter,” he said, seeing both Plutarch and Coin walk neatly into the trap, and fighting the urge to smile at it, even as he felt the sorrow and guilt seething through him at being forced to deliberately abandon them for a few months yet. He’d left them behind in Mentor Central already, left Cecelia and Gloss and Enobaria and Finnick in the arena, if any of them were even alive yet. Now he had to leave them to suffer again for months and months, abandoned and forlorn, and of all people, he’d felt what it was like to have no hope in a despairing solitude. If any of them died in that forsaken place, he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself that. “Perfect time for a nice propo to fire people up again too. So how about we plan on that, mm?”

“Is attempting the rescues, if it’s not an utterly suicidal bit of foolishness, a term of yours?” Coin addressed Johanna.

“It is,” she fired back crisply, eyes fierce in a way that Haymitch could see Plutarch watching with something almost like glee, probably wishing he could bottle that look up and unleash it on-camera whenever he wanted. “I want it agreed upon right now that there’s intent of a rescue attempt being made for both the captive victors, and the surviving children, before New Year’s.” 

Coin mulled it over. “Heavensbee? This will depend largely on the intelligence network cultivated in the Capitol.”

“Not my agents, I only take the reports—but well, the less you know, the better,” Plutarch said smoothly. “But yes, that, and continuing cooperation by my counterpart in Two,” Plutarch acknowledged, muttering half to himself in clear irritation, “whoever they are.” His voice went back to normal volume. “But I’ll admit finding out about the Peacekeeper moles was an unexpected windfall. If they happen to have an insider within the very walls of the Detention Center…well, that would help.”

“On point, Heavensbee,” Coin chided.

“Ah.” Plutarch looked chagrined in an embarrassed sort of way, like a boy who’d gotten his hand slapped while he drooled at a slice of cake. “If we get the intel, and you’re willing to commit the troops…”

“All right, Phoenix, you’ll have your rescue. Anything else?”

“Oh, I’ll let you know if I think of anything,” Johanna said with that sharp-edged sweetness that Haymitch read as a warning sign. “Don’t worry. I won’t demand someone to fluff my pillows at night.”

“Then let’s move on to the updated status of the districts.” 

Boggs, the colonel who’d retrieved them from Nine, stepped up, picking up a purple marker and turned to the clear display screen where now a projection of Panem stood in bold relief, towns and collectives and research facilities and other strategic points clearly marked. Haymitch stared at it in fascination. He’d seen a small slice of this on the datapad beamed to him, bits of Nine and Ten, but not the whole thing before him now. The only maps he’d ever seen of the nation marked the district boundaries and the wide stretches of empty borderlands between, and the locations of the district centers. They looked like a child’s crayon drawing next to the sharp detail depicted here. 

He’d had a vague sense from talking to Spark Fortescue that Three had multiple research centers, but he’d had no idea exactly where they were. Chances were, even Spark didn’t know that—he could tell about the medical research commune where he’d been raised, and the district center after he’d moved in at Victors’ Vista overlooking the bay, but nothing else. Most of the Nine farmers hadn’t known the precise locations of other places in their own district either, and the Ten ranchers knew only the depot at the northern edge of the range where they drove their cattle to drop them off. 

Miners in Twelve were aware of the names of mines besides Dunstan’s right in town, and they knew except for the anthracite mines in the far northeast district that they mined for a few weeks in summer that all the bituminous mines were a few hours away at worst, and in what general direction. But he doubted any of them knew exactly _where_ those mines might be. They always went to the mines each day in the hyper-trains with no windows. Even in the far-flung districts where people were only ever trundled to their district centers solely for Reaping Day, or Johanna’s people who regularly cycled between summer logging camps and winter quarters in the district center, he’d heard that they were transported in trains or hovercraft, likewise without windows, presumably so they couldn’t start to accurately mark their location in proximity to anything. 

Staring at that ghostly map shining there, put in mind of how vague people’s notions were of even their own district, let alone anyone else’s district, he saw that was one more careful tactic of Snow’s in denying everyone such simple information as an accurate, complete map.

So it was with some surprise that it was only the sight of Boggs with his marker sketching something on the display that broke through, as Coin directed him on which farms in Eleven had been overtaken by the rebellion.

Between the group of them, the area now held within rebel control stood out, a stark purple outline looping through most of south Nine and Ten, and western Eleven. A few solitary small circles marked successful uprisings elsewhere—a camp in southeastern Seven and another in the distant west almost due north of Six’s district center, a farm in far eastern Eleven, two small outposts in the southern tip of Four, and some jagged lines in the borderlands to denote cut power lines that Five’s work crews had handled. Then there were large purple “X”s to mark the failed effort in Six’s district center, and another failure in northern One near the silver mines, and “P” to show where Peacekeepers had further reinforced Three, Five, and Six. He noticed the silence from Twelve—not unexpected.

“We’ll lose those isolated rebel outposts, of course,” Coin predicted grimly. “The ones in Eleven we’ll retake quickly as the troops are sweeping that way anyway, but Four and Seven will be difficult to capture and of little strategic use,” she shrugged, “we’ve no need of fishermen when obtaining fuel oil for their boats will be well-nigh impossible with Five’s refineries in enemy hands, and Seven…we’ve no need for lumber or paper.”

Seeing the look on Johanna’s face, mingled rage and panic, he stepped in before she could start simply shouting incoherently at her district being written off so casually. “This is where we’ve _won_ already,” he argued, rapping his knuckles on the table for emphasis. “Look what we’re doing in Nine, Ten, and Eleven, taking it farm by farm, camp by camp. We’re not able to stand there and slug it out with them face-to-face in a massive battle of armies in Milltown up in Eight, let alone take the Capitol. But irregular tactics, using the terrain if we can, and the isolation of those outposts? Four and Seven would be perfect for a continuation of that. They don’t know yet how to defend against that. They’ll figure it out soon enough, though, so we’d damn well better get as much of those districts as we can in our hands first while those tactics still work.” He shrugged in return, trying to keep the disdain out of the gesture. “They may not be resources that are war-critical, but tend to Four and Seven and you’re going to have free men and women eager to join the fight in other places. Free men and women who are no fools with their knives and axes, if nothing else, so I imagine they’ll train up smart enough for the fight.” He waved a hand towards the map, and the daunting wave of purple Peacekeeper notations that marred the landscapes of Three, Five, and Six. “Because face it, we’re going to _need_ to take the three western districts in time to deny all of that to the Capitol, and that little task? That’s going to need an army. And that army has to get raised from somewhere, and cut its teeth in combat somewhere.”

Coin sat back in her chair, right leg crossed over her left at the knee, and looked at him with that careful consideration, as if he was something to be studied and quantified. For a moment there seemed to be something like impatient anger that marred her features, but it was gone, like ripples in the water that smoothed out. “You didn’t lie to me, Heavensbee,” she said smoothly. “He’s quite the impressive strategist, for all the deficiencies of his upbringing.” Well, that was a backhanded compliment if he’d ever heard one. “I had wondered if you could think beyond an arena, Abernathy.” She nodded to Johanna. “I can see why you want to keep him with you, Mason.”

“He’s got the right idea,” Johanna said, voice full of a fierce determination, one that was devoid of her usual smug rage, and that told Haymitch she wouldn’t be crossed without taking a toll for it. “We take back Three in one huge push and then what? We’re cut off from everything else, can’t send hovercraft without passing through Capitol-controlled airspace. Snow panics and sends everything he has at us in one massive strike and it’s ‘goodbye, rebellion’. We take dozens of camps and farms and collectives, and we hold ‘em, it’s like becoming a cloud of gnats. He can’t get us all with one swat and by and by, we’ll wear him down.” She eyed Coin, no apology or hesitation in her gaze. “Seven will fight. And nobody knows the woods like us. But yeah, all right, it’s a huge district and the camps are all so mobile. There’s no set location from year to year. We’ll definitely need hovercraft support to move between them. We may end up having to scout for other camps. It’ll be tougher to find them. But whatever we don’t get freed up in summer, they’ll be all together again in the winter town come November or so with lessened Peacekeeper control. Chew away at it some through the summer and fall, and you’ll get the rest of it after first snow with one last punch.” 

One dark eyebrow rose and Haymitch spied a faint curl to her lip as she said, “Besides, I may be trying to rally all the districts, but if I blatantly abandon my own home district, that’s gonna look pretty bad for me across the whole nation, yeah? And here Plutarch’s put such pretty propos together to make the nice people like me.” He tried to not smile as he heard the faintest edge of sarcasm that she couldn’t quite suppress.

Plutarch looked back and forth between him and Johanna, and then Coin, as if coolly assessing where best to throw his weight to back the winner. Haymitch watched his face crinkling in pensiveness, lips pursed slightly and twisted, pencil drumming on the tabletop. He stared over at the map next. “I think they have a point,” he finally spoke up. “As well-trained as your soldiers are here, their numbers are limited, and so are your resources. We’ll have to train and provision an army, and with a finite supply of hovercraft, we’ll have to deploy and move troops with utmost care. The food-producing districts are the most important start on supply. As for weapons…”

“If you want more weapons or hovercraft,” Coin said, shaking her head, “that will require a much greater capacity for steelworking than we currently possess. Our smelters have been working for years simply to get to these levels.”

“We’re not taking One or Six in a hurry, ma’am,” Boggs finally ventured. “We could maybe get One for the iron mines, but it’s in grave danger of being vulnerable and surrounded by hostiles…” Haymitch’s eyes strayed to the map again and he readily saw what Boggs meant—Capitol to the south, Capitol-held Six and Two to the west and east, respectively, and the massive, uncertain bulk of Seven to the north.

“What are those Peacekeeper spies for? We get the info and then we steal an ore shipment or two en route from One to the steel forges in Six,” Johanna said coolly. He hid a smile at her sheer brass, but it was a good plan. Passing through the borderlands, undefended except for the Peacekeepers on the train—yeah, it could be done.

“ _You_ don’t,” Coin turned her down flat. “Too much risk, given this is not a good propo opportunity.” She nodded to Boggs. “Colonel, securing that supply will be your task.”

Johanna looked irritated for a split second herself, but then slowly, stiffly, nodded. “It’s better done sudden and clandestine, I agree.”

“Very well. So we’ll prioritize various targets in Districts Four and Seven, and continuing our existing operations in Nine, Ten, and Eleven. One, Three, Five, and Six are not good candidates at this time until further areas are within our control. Two—Rathbone wants to hold a meeting to discuss the situation there tomorrow morning.” Coin’s jaw twitched slightly. “I understand it’s complex. Eight, as previously discussed, will also require a direct assault which is not practical at this time. As for District Twelve…”

Brain working through all of that and trying to bridge all those facts into scenarios and strategy, it took him a moment to realize she was looking his way as a cue. “We have rather limited intelligence from Twelve,” she said. 

“No agents there?”

“By the sound of it, nobody bothered much with Twelve as it wasn’t reckoned as a player,” Plutarch said frankly, “and unfortunately, the one agent they did have in there before the Head Peacekeeper turnover died of pneumonia during the winter.”

“Nobody bothered with Twelve.” He allowed himself a slight, sarcastic smile at that. “Well, that’s nothing new.”

“So tell me, Abernathy,” Coin said. “I suspect you held information back last time we discussed this and let Heavensbee do all the talking.”

“But…” 

“Heavensbee,” Coin said. Just his name, carrying the whip-like force of a command, and he saw Plutarch shut down from it.

He hated her a bit in that moment for pulling this out of him, tapping into a dark fear that he’d confessed to nobody else that even if Katniss and Peeta came home alive, the bright shining veneer of it all would have tarnished. “The district started to turn on them some already,” he admitted, not meeting Coin’s eyes, staring instead at the thick purple marks in Twelve’s district center. “They ain’t stupid. They knew exactly for whose sake the Capitol decided to tighten down the screws.” Every bit of it: the deadlier work, the higher quotas, the Peacekeepers everywhere, the whipping and executions, the tesserae that never arrived, the spoiled Parcel Day packages. When he’d become virtually a non-person, he’d noticed that some of them talked about things like he wasn’t even there, or as if they wanted him to know their contempt openly. “There were more than a few people saying we’d have all been better off if they both died in the arena last year as Twelve tributes always did. That would have meant nothing changed, whereas them coming home only made it worse.” 

He shook his head. They’d bid the kids the three-finger salute as farewell on Reaping Day, but he could see the difference in the faces from a year ago—it was back to polite respect for the condemned, not affection. “They won’t rally to fight in Katniss’ memory, or for Peeta’s loss, or whatever. They all have grievances and grief of their own from this last winter. They didn’t even rise up and they got punished for the sake of the Twelve victors. They’re just hoping to endure and not be entirely destroyed, because any move by them and I imagine Snow’s going to come down hard, especially as another Twelve girl winning this latest bloodbath probably didn’t make him happy. And so another victor,” now he tipped a hand in Johanna’s direction, “urging them to fight is going to go nowhere. My saying anything won’t work either.” What goodwill he’d earned by saving two tributes last year had been lost when those same tributes were the reason for everyone’s suffering.

“Then it’s a good thing Twelve is not particularly strategic in terms of resources, as we can obtain coal elsewhere, or manpower,” Coin said. Haymitch looked down at the tabletop then, not wanting her to see the hate that must have been in his eyes for the casual dismissal. Capitol, Thirteen—both of them called Twelve useless. They may not have loved him, but they were still _his_ , dammit, and he wouldn’t see them so easily abandoned.

Thankfully, he had help on that. “We should take it back in time, though,” Plutarch argued. “If we abandon the home district of the initial figurehead of this rebellion, it looks like we’re conceding something important to Snow. Twelve is likely still seen as the spiritual birthplace of this war, ma’am, like it or not.”

“Very well. But we’ll wait it out a bit, until it’s unexpected. Because I imagine right now President Snow is thinking just as you are and is prepared for an assault on Twelve, and I won’t lose my troops in a sheer bloodbath over a place of no physical strategic value. We’ll reconvene tomorrow morning at 1000 to discuss plans for District Two, and deployment to the other districts. In the meantime, Mason, Abernathy, you’ve been assigned to work in the Medical Division.” At his questioning look she said dryly, “I had figured you might want to be around Mellark as he convalesces, Abernathy, not to mention you both have some outstanding medical issues to deal with of your own. You’ll also undergo thorough training as field medics.” All right, he could see the logic to it, and felt an odd surge of gratitude for the consideration of putting him near Peeta.

“Has he been told about his family?” he asked bluntly.

“Yes. The doctors notified him.” He wished it would have been another victor, rather than a coldly clinical notification.

“If we’re done here, I’m gonna go see him.” He shrugged. “And get to work, I suppose.” At least they’d give him something to do while he waited to get back in the field so he wouldn’t go ever crazier than he already was.

“Examination and clearance by the medical staff first,” Coin insisted. “Standard protocol for returning troops.”

So down in the infirmary, he endured being prodded and questioned while dressed in a flimsy cotton smock, trying to not think of sessions with the preps or Sixleigh, the victors’ physician. “Have the symptoms lessened?”

The cravings hadn’t. Even now, some part of him wanted a drink and to go find a corner to hide in. The panic-stricken anxious part of him agreed. The pissed-off part of him wanted to hit something. So the mindfuckery of it all was clearly alive and well, yelling loudly at him. But at least the sweating and nausea and the paranoid way of seeing things that weren’t there had eased off. He’d talk to the shrink about the mental stuff, but he could at least report to the doctors that his body was on the mend.

“Intestinal issues sorted out as well?”

He snorted in amusement. Apparently living off a largely liquid diet for years had messed his guts up for a bit once solid food entered the picture, but he hadn’t been nearly as sick this time as after that first sudden, agonizing withdrawal following the Quell card reading. Withdrawal this time had been miserable, but to a lesser degree. The first time, he genuinely believed he might die, and Perulla and Hazelle both agreed—more ghosts to haunt his mind, those two. This time, he’d only sometimes wished he were dead. It was like rolling down a hill rather than falling off a cliff. _At least it wasn’t a cliff with a force field to bounce me back right back where I started,_ he thought with an edge of mingled amusement and panic. “I’ve been living off jerky, corn, and hard biscuits. Not sure that’s much of a test. But I had worse when they patched my guts back together after the arena,” he replied.

Finally, they released him with a clean bill of health, though with a warning that he looked slightly jaundiced beneath his tan, so they’d continue to monitor his liver enzymes for the next few months to make sure he hadn’t completely fried it. Nodding impatiently at that—whatever happened, it wasn’t about him at this point—he got dressed again as the doctors turned to Johanna, waiting her turn. Glancing at her, hesitating and wondering if she’d rather he stick around, she nodded over towards Peeta as if to tell him to go ahead.

When he approached, he saw the bruises and cuts had long since faded. But aside from the sharp medicinal smell, there was a whiff of the rotten-sweet scent of corruption. He looked at Peeta’s remaining leg and saw the angry red streaks emerging from under the loose bandage. They were still fighting the infection then, even after this long. Shit. What kind of poison had been on the teeth of those mutts? 

Peeta looked at his leg and then looked up at Haymitch without any expression. “They told me to be ready to lose the leg. Chances are they can’t beat whatever junk is rotting the wound. They’re losing ground to it still, even with everything they’ve tried.” His voice wasn’t calm. It was flat and dead. “I told them that they should let me go.”

He shook his head, denying it. “No.”

“It ain’t your decision to make, Haymitch.”

He sat down heavily beside Peeta, striving for compassion, for respect for the decision, and he couldn’t find it. He’d given a variation of this speech to the other victors, but obviously he needed to hear it. “No, you’re right. But you? You’re acting like a selfish little boy right now,” he said. He leaned in, voice going low. “We’ll be honest. Eleven other kids died last year solely to buy your life. Lots of people died over the winter because you were the extra kid who survived the arena. More people died in the Quell because you didn’t die last year. Katniss died trying to protect you. Your ma, your pa, your brothers, died because of Coriolanus Snow, yes, but their lives were the price of loving you. So no, Peeta,” and his use of the boy’s name startled Peeta into realizing how dead serious Haymitch was, “you _do not_ get to die, you don’t get to throw all those cut-short lives that paid for yours away and tell them that they died for _nothing_ , nothing at all, just because it hurts. You know what? Dying hurts a hell of a lot more, and you have a responsibility to them.”

Peeta’s eyes met his, and now the pain was there, obvious and bottomless. Haymitch had the unsettling sense that if there had been a bottle of white lightning to hand, Peeta would have started in on it already. So maybe he was selfish himself—he couldn’t lose Peeta too, couldn’t make all the losses and sacrifices worth nothing. Couldn’t lose him, period, because to watch another person die on his account—no. “So I do what? Go out there and fight with no legs?”

“You survive. You try to pay your debts.” He drew in a shaky breath. “And you find a way to live. If you can. Ain’t saying I’ve done well with that myself. But mind, if I’d packed it in all those years ago when I was sitting where you’re sitting now…you wouldn’t be alive right now. She wouldn’t have lived an extra year either, with you getting to actually love her rather than just moon over this fantasy you had of her.”

Peeta looked at him in silence for a few long moments. “Would you take it back? The girl you—talked about in that propo?” Haymitch tried to not look away, oddly ashamed that Peeta knew—stupid, given the entire country did, but somehow with this boy it mattered more. Mostly he was grateful beyond speaking that at least Peeta wasn’t asking about his being whored out.

“If I could go back and never….yes, I would. So she’d live. But she died. And you couldn’t save Katniss—neither of us could.”

“I keep thinking that…”

“There was nothing you could do,” he repeated. “Twenty-three years up in that mentor chair. You think I didn’t rip myself to shreds wondering what else I could have done? We don’t control it. You aren’t to blame for her, or any of the others. Snow and the Capitol did it. But you,” he reached out and tapped Peeta’s chest, “you’re what’s left of them now. And maybe there’s finally a chance that we can change the world so nobody else has to die like that. So here’s the deal. You stay alive and I stay sober. We both keep going. Try to find a way to live.”

Peeta thought it over for a long while, hands resting loosely on his thighs. “Deal,” he said finally. But his voice cracked on the word, and Haymitch had felt that hurt too, the feeling of being alone and caught in a trap with tight walls and no escape but with no other recourse but to keep enduring and hope that somehow, in time, it would hurt less.

Then suddenly Peeta was crying, tears and snot running down his face as he shook with great ugly gulping sobs. He’d been even younger than Peeta when it happened, but oh, he’d been there too. Dead girl, dead family—he’d been cast into a world that was lovelorn, blood-soaked, dark and empty, nothing but pain and guilt and solitude. So he reached out and folded Peeta in close, that stocky frame already promising at a grown man’s formidable strength, but still utterly a child as Peeta wept on his shoulder, pounding Haymitch’s chest with his fists, howls of grief muffled into Haymitch’s shirt. He glanced up and waved the doctor off with an impatient flick of his hand. No drugs. The boy needed to let it out with someone who gave a shit, not be doped up to the point he didn’t feel it. Grief wasn't supposed to be tidy. Nobody had done this for him all those years ago, nobody had done it for Johanna either, so he would do it for Peeta now.


	18. Chapter 18

Chantilly made for a fairly undemanding roommate, as things went. Cashmere appreciated that much, if nothing else. She was from One, a senior victor who’d helped train Cashmere in her final classes at the Center. She’d been the one who advised her about mentoring, and spent part of Cashmere’s victor year helping her prepare for the inevitability of being put on the circuit. They might not always see eye to eye, and Cashmere never could get exactly why she was so damn fond of the likes of Haymitch Abernathy, but Chantilly _understood_. 

Fully aware most of the other victors regarded her as an unrepentant bitch, she didn’t bother to correct them. If they were stupid enough to not see what it meant, not only being a victor but having someone so close to her as her own twin handed over to the Capitol to be abused—maybe Finnick had been the closest to getting it, when his girlfriend had won the 70th Games and now he had so much more to lose, so much more leverage right there for Snow to twist and pull. But Annie Cresta had been removed away safe from it all, like the snowbirds tucked away in their remote eyries up in the mountain cliffs of One. Gloss took every bit of it.

 _Do you think I ever wanted to fuck my own brother?_ she wanted to shriek at them, their judging stares and disapproving headshakes. _I only ever wanted to protect him._ Assholes, making the usual perverted assumptions about twins—they were supposed to be on _her_ side.

She’d protected Gloss, all right. Protected him by helping him get through the Center entrance exams, too young and too stupid to realize what it would mean a dozen years down the road. They’d been six years old, and the only thing that made sense was that she couldn’t bear to leave him, and he couldn’t bear to leave her.

She’d helped get him in, but he’d gotten himself through all the years of training and constant tests, finally got into the arena at eighteen, stayed alive and gotten out. For all they saw the sweetness that even all the Center polish couldn’t beat out of him and thought he was the weak one, and maybe he was laid-back enough to let others lead and sometimes shrewdly let them hang themselves by it, Gloss was tough as nails in the end. It hadn’t been her that got him through that arena.

He was the only person in this world she could fully trust, and he’d been left behind. They never should have been in that arena anyway. 

As far as Cashmere was concerned, Katniss Everdeen was simply another self-absorbed little bitch whose world began and ended with her boyfriend—they’d seemingly all forgotten that oh-so-precious little sister, Katniss included—so everyone else could go to hell. She hadn’t forgotten how the girl had treated Glimmer and Marvel. Hadn’t forgotten the look of distaste on Katniss’ face at Glimmer’s ravaged body, the snapping sound of the girl’s fingers as Katniss broke them to get the bow. She’d had to watch Gloss sitting at his mentor console, gently taking off his earpiece with a resigned sigh while the girl crooned and sobbed to the little Eleven girl while Marvel lay there mere feet away, equally dead but not considered human enough to mourn. 

She doubted the girl had even known the names of the One tributes, though she’d acted on her Victory Tour like she actually cared, the little liar. That was what she couldn’t forgive—a Career accepted certain levels of ruthlessness as necessary. Only one person would survive in the end and that meant plans and deception and strategy, and she could easily accept that. A Twelve tribute managing to do more than cry and die quickly should have been something to respect, but Katniss? She’d been such a hypocrite. Played it coolly as a Career and then acted like she actually was so good, so much better, like she wasn’t a deliberate killer and her shits in the arena weren’t being caught on camera like everyone else. 

She hadn’t felt a burning need to kill the girl herself—she wasn’t insane on points of honor like Two. But she certainly shed no tears for Katniss Everdeen’s death. There had been people in that arena she mourned far more than the girl who’d sent them all there in the first place. Too bad the rebellion jumped right from one hypocrite straight to another one.

At least they hadn’t roomed her with Johanna. Chances were only one of them would survive that. Cashmere still hadn’t forgotten how the little bitch had propositioned her, gotten busy with her right on the couch in the lounge, and right as things were going along and it felt so damn good, in walked Finnick Odair. 

She’d never forget the small smile of triumph curling Johanna’s lip in that moment—so this was her revenge, because Gloss had taken Finnick home the night before. She’d had to listen to the sounds of loud gasps and Finnick yelping Gloss’ name all night, chuckling and rolling her eyes. Then of course in stomped Haymitch, bitching at everybody like his undershorts were too tight, and she hadn’t had the chance to slap Johanna like she deserved, but as she walked out, she’d felt the slight satisfaction of hearing Haymitch tear into both Finnick and Johanna like the little twits deserved. He might be past his prime and getting sloppy, but the old man knew what was what— _We’ve got enough people trying to fuck us over, we don’t fuck over our own._

She’d been sold, submitted to any number of perversions already, but she’d been trained for it, prepared for it. She hadn’t been prepared for a fellow victor to use her that way. She’d felt every bit as dirty as when they turned what she and Gloss had into something sordid and disgusting. Because like how that had betrayed what being twins meant, what Johanna did betrayed that bond of victorhood. So that was what Johanna Mason thought, huh? District One—the professional whores.

Then Johanna had cut another path through the victors when Finnick dumped her, fucking them left and right to prove to a man who didn’t want her just how little she cared about him, uncaring of the wreckage left in her wake by it. At least after that Johanna kept to fucking Capitolites. Damn outer districts and their inevitable freak-outs because they were too _noble_ to accept reality and do what had to be done to prepare their tributes and their victors. Blight had been on the circuit, he ought to have gotten a better grip on her, prepared her better, and gotten that shit under control. 

The schedule tattoo that morning told her, in that sickly purple ink, that they were to report to Command right after breakfast. “Oh good, another committee,” she said, enjoying the sarcasm.

One had made such a reputation for being about beauty and art, made the Capitol admire them and desire them, and played that leverage into a better living for everyone. She’d been expected to be appealing in her appearance and mannerisms for so long.

At least the food here was no worse than it had been for most of One the last winter. They had precious perfect Katniss to thank for that as well. The unrest in other districts meant that the Capitol hurried to hoard goods from those districts, and the orders for luxury goods dried up. She’d seen the long lines throughout the winter for the ration queues to claim tesserae, and what good was the beautifully carved door lintel when starvation was a real possibility? She knew the ugly mood the day Katniss and Peeta had stopped in One on their Victory Tour had been due to those lean months endured for the girl’s sheer selfish stupidity, and how little she’d thought of Marvel and Glimmer hadn’t helped. At least another Career would have respected them in death.

Drawing her hair back into the usual utilitarian ponytail and wearing the plain grey clothing, and having nobody to please, felt like a relief in some ways. Openly feeling anger felt _good_. She hadn’t been allowed that luxury in so long. The menace of rage was for meant for Two, with their brooding, fierce honor. One was supposed to be playful, seductive, charming, and Four was supposed to be mysterious, appealingly exotic, a little mischievous. That was the way it was. She’d only allowed herself the very occasional bitchy remark to another victor if she thought they were genuinely out of line, but for the most part, she’d throttled back her rage. She’d played her part and been One’s golden girl, all glamour and glitter and grace. It was only the Quell that freed her from some of those shackles. If she was going to die anyway, she’d tell some of them what she really thought.

They ended up down in the infirmary, down in hard aluminum chairs beside Peeta’s bed. The kid looked like hell, and lay there with his eyes half-open as if he was exhausted, or drugged, or both. She could smell the sickly scent of rot, and like that, it was as if she was back in the arena on that day when the scent of gangrene grew too bad to hide beneath the honey-thick odor of flowers. The arena had been lush, rolling hills and a meadow a bright carpet of flowers. They’d all soon nursed wounds from the biting and stinging insects of that arena, everything from mere nuisance gnats to mosquitoes carrying disease, all the way to killer bees and tracker jackers. The insect veils arrived on the third day, along with sting-cream that blessedly relieved the wounds. But on the fourth day, she and Sterling found out that the Four boy that year had been desperately hiding a putrid wound high on his chest from the sting of some insect. They’d made it merciful and quick for him. 

At least Chantilly had seated them in chairs that weren’t right up against Peeta, so if she didn’t inhale too deeply, the memories didn’t stir. If they hadn’t healed that leg after close to two weeks now, it wasn’t going to happen. Not wanting to look at the boy as he rotted from the inside out, Cashmere instead eyed Johanna and Haymitch—so here were the conquering heroes again. The delicate tracery of burns on the back of Johanna’s hands had faded to pink, though the deep tan on her skin made them stand out all the more.

Taking her seat beside Chantilly, she waited to hear what Coin had to say. “Mason informs me that you have all been apprised of the current situation regarding your family members.” Yeah, Chantilly had told Cashmere last night, presumably after a chat with Haymitch. Somehow, Cashmere wasn’t surprised that they wouldn’t stir themselves. Not for Gloss and Niello and the like. But if it had been precious Katniss or her sweet little Peeta as a Capitol “guest”, they’d have moved mountains to get them back. If anyone thought there was such a thing as fairness and equality in the world, they were a complete idiot. “Rescue will be attempted when a more strategic opportunity presents itself.” 

Easy enough for Haymitch and Johanna to negotiate that deal, given they didn’t have any human bargaining chips to lose. Their people had been dead for years, as she’d pointed out the day of the executions. Maybe they were the lucky ones, though. They could be clean and ruthless in that way.

At least with death a clean severance meant something, a finality, whereas Gloss being out there in Capitol hands, maybe alive, probably tortured, was a barbed hook that tore at her heart slowly. She hadn’t asked for any of this, hadn’t asked to be rescued by them, and the knowledge that her being here and identified with the rebellion probably meant that Snow would take it out on her brother curdled her anger and fear into an even more leaden lump within her. She was supposed to look out for Gloss—that was the way it had always been. The Capitol took that from her with the Quell where only one of them could have lived, and now these damn rebels took it from her too by leaving him behind.

She was from One and they might be able to smile and charm and seduce their way to victory and through their victorhood, but the damn fool outer districts in their condescension never understood was that meant Ones _fought_ , with guile and brains as well as weapons of steel and wood. She wasn’t meant to be caged, frustrated and helpless, and so she couldn’t help but lash out at those that had brought her to this place, forced her hand without her choosing it as much as the Capitol ever had. They’d given her no choices ever since she’d arrived her either, and hearing that maybe if they were lucky they could try to rescue Gloss come winter—no, Snow was worse than this lot, without question, but the resentment burned keenly within her anyway. They’d made their secret rebellion plans and put her and Gloss further on the hook unknowing, and they now expected her to be a good girl and simply accept her place in things. 

“Oh, sure,” she said sarcastically. “My brother isn’t ‘strategic’ enough for you to care. I’m sure Niello isn’t either, or Chantilly’s kids, or any of us, really. You only give a crap if Johanna stays alive, don’t you? Maybe Haymitch too, since he’s your little mastermind. So this little rebellion’s moved from worshipping a self-centered little brat who almost got us all killed because she didn’t know when to be grateful she was vastly coming out ahead and keep her mouth shut, to a self-centered brat who also doesn’t know when to keep her mouth shut and just uses people.”

“Fuck you, Cash,” Johanna said, but without the smug, self-righteous anger Cashmere was used to hearing. She said it as if she’d actually been hurt. 

But it was Peeta’s stricken face that she noticed when his almost animal moan of pain made him look at her—something in that vulnerable expression framed by a mop of blond hair reminded her so much of Gloss that it hurt, and she felt the first cut of shame at kicking him when he was already so obviously down. He hadn’t asked for this either, had he?

“She’s right, you know,” Peeta rasped, pushing himself up on his elbows, and eyeing President Coin. “Either we all have worth, or none of us do.”

Coin shot back crisply, “And losing soldiers and valuable spies needlessly in a rush to retrieve your people before a plan to minimize losses isn’t going to happen. Or do you wish to rethink your stance Mellark, that all lives have worth?” She shook her head slightly. “Righteousness doesn’t win wars. Victory means accepting hard realities.”

“Lady,” Blight said, anger coloring his voice, “you don’t need to tell us about ‘victory means hard realities.’ We’ve lived it. We’re still living it.” Useless as the man had been for years, Cashmere had to murmur in assent to that along with the rest of them. Well, who knew? Seems like all they’d needed was someone who pissed them all off without pitting them against each other like Snow had, and suddenly she was one of the club.

Coin simply looked at them without any discernable expression. She’d have made a good Two, Cashmere thought wryly, steel-stark as she was. Lyme and Brutus didn’t look as pissed as the rest of them—no wonder, because they spoke her language. “You all have your assigned jobs, of course.” Cashmere had been sent to the laundry. She wondered if Coin was punishing her for being from the luxury district with one of the shittiest jobs, full of sweat and toil and backbreaking labor, dealing with hundreds of pounds of sweat-reeking shirts, semen-stained sheets, and shit-streaked underwear, every day. “For those of you who wish to join in our military training, that’s your prerogative. Heavensbee informs me that of course there’s a desire to see victors leading from the front in this war.” 

“I’m going to Two once I’m cleared to help fire up some points of rebellion,” Lyme said firmly, looking at all of them as if daring them to deny such an opportunity. “I’m not sitting this war out here in Thirteen, and Two’s going to be a slow boil. And they won’t respond as well to Johanna or anyone who’s not one of their own. We need to get it started there now and encourage the ones who do want to rebel, or else it’ll be the last district standing between us and the Capitol with the diehards having tightened control.”

“It’ll be a tough nut to crack, regardless,” Plutarch murmured, then smiled as if he was peculiarly amused with his own words.

Well, Cashmere couldn’t argue with that. Two and its fanatics would be tough as gristle, and they wouldn’t be won over by Johanna prancing around on camera, or fighting in other districts. No, they’d need to see one of their own.

“And I’m going with her,” Brutus rumbled, though there was a moment of panic on his face as if the fact he’d actually said it startled him. But then he folded his arms over his chest, looking like a well-fed cat.

“I’ll go.” There were some eyes suddenly on her—Chaff looked startled, but Lyme gave her a slight smile and a nod of what might have been approval.

Chantilly leaned over, eyes full of concern. “You sure, Cash?”

She might not be all about this revolution of theirs, and whatever crap about peace and love they were spouting. But she hated the Capitol enough that the simple idea of _freedom_ meant everything. Besides, anyone that would let her actually fight to hopefully help get Gloss back was worth heeding. She’d handed over enough pieces of her soul for far less.

She shook her head, throat tightening down against the surge of emotion. “I can’t stay here, Tilly,” she said, her teeth gritted with the force of not screaming it all out. She couldn’t sit here safe and lazy, doing laundry, being awkward around the other victors, and just hoping they’d get around to rescuing Gloss someday. She could fight, she could charm, and she could look good on camera for Plutarch’s bullshit. All the things she’d been taught since childhood. But this time, it would all be by her choice. 

“Besides, we all know Careers stick together, and the sooner we get Two secure, the quicker we can get to fighting to make One free, right?” She smiled, that winning golden-girl smile that had secured her so many sponsorships, and later, patrons. 

“Oh, very good,” Plutarch said. She noted with amusement it seemed like everyone pointedly ignored him. Not easy to like the man who’d flung them all into the arena again simply to try to save one idiot girl who’d died anyway, and one whom the rebellion hadn’t even needed in the end.

“Anyone else?” Coin asked. “Latier, Parker, you can’t go. You’re on tech division duty here. You’re of far better use there than out in the field.” 

Beetee shrugged twitchily. “We ought to have their weapons ready by the time their training is completed, and we’ll continue looking into options for alternate materials for firearms and hovercraft.”

Wiress patted his hand and looked at Lyme, Brutus, and Cashmere, chuckling delightedly. “You’ll get presents!”

“And we don’t even have to get ‘em on parachutes?” Haymitch said dryly.

“I’ll go.” The voice was so quiet it took Cashmere a moment to recognize someone had spoken, and then to process who it had been. But she looked towards Annie Cresta, and that glazed look of being a million miles away wasn’t in those pale green eyes. “I’ll go,” Annie repeatedly more firmly. “They’ve taken Mags from me. Finnick. My family too. This time, it’s my turn to fight.” She eyed Lyme, Brutus, and Cashmere and a slight smile twitched her lips. “Besides, Careers gotta stick together, as you said, Cash. Might be nice to have the good ol’ alliance, but it doesn’t end in murder, no?” 

Cashmere couldn’t help but smile wryly at that, actually liking Annie in that moment. Though admittedly, after Finnick and Mags fucked them over in the Quell, hadn’t even allowed her to be asked in as part of this little rebellion they’d been planning, it wouldn’t be easy to trust a Four again. 

Of course, finding out Chantilly and Niello had gone behind her back as well didn’t make her all that thrilled. But it was easier to forgive Niello because he was paying for it in spades, and as for Chantilly, having a husband and two kids as Capitol hostages was more than punishment enough. She might be a bit of a bitch but even the hotly vindictive streak that was coming to light after all these years had its limits. 

Besides, she couldn’t help but love Citrine and Sardonyx. Everyone in Victors’ Square had, even as they’d all secretly mourned the inevitable. The twins had turned six last April and both been admitted to the Center—Gold-rated prospects. Chantilly and Niello had effectively lost them that day. She’d said goodbye to the kids as well, with the sick feeling that in a dozen years, there was a good chance she’d watch them on television as the new version of herself and Gloss. But there had never been a legacy victor, let alone two in the same family. She hadn’t been sure whether or not it would be worse for them to die in the arena, or survive it. No victor could ever honestly answer that question, could they? Chantilly and Niello may have effectively lost their kids that day, but that couldn’t help Chantilly’s heart now. Knowing last year they were arena bait was more than bad enough. To imagine them now being hurt, starved, beaten—there were perverts in the Capitol of all stripes, and One’s very seductive image couldn’t help. The very thought of it made her want to kill someone on Trina and Donny’s behalf, when she’d already endured any degradation for years in silence. 

“Cresta, no,” Coin said dismissively. “You’re medically—“

“You let him go, despite his drinking problems being real public,” Annie said, gesturing to Haymitch. “I don’t think you can argue my going after that.” Johanna’s eyes flashed with temper, but Cashmere saw Haymitch put his hand on her shoulder. Oh, so that was the way of it?

“She’s got a point,” Clover said.

Coin got that constipated look again. “If,” she said, the word coming out with a cutting precision of enunciation, “you can pass the training and prove your mental state is controlled and reliable, Cresta, very well. You’ll submit yourself to psychological counseling sessions as well during your training.”

Annie nodded at that, once again serene as the surface of a mountain pond. “Can’t hurt,” she said with a shrug. 

“Is that all?” Coin said. 

“We’ll come if we can help you,” Johanna said.

Lyme gave a snort of amusement. “You’ve got plenty of other districts to tend to, kiddo. Leave us one or two.”

Cashmere looked around at the rest of them who weren’t committed one way or the other. Peeta, Clover, Blight, Chantilly, Chaff. _So once again nobody wants to ally with the evil Careers,_ she thought. Nothing had changed, had it?

“Don’t ask it,” Haymitch said quietly, looking around at the rest of them with a look of tired understanding on his face. “Peeta’s too injured. The rest, they’ve all got kids in Capitol hands right now. If those kids get back, they need to have _someone_ to come home to, hey? Chaff’s all that Chardy’s got left. If Niel doesn’t make it back, Tilly has to be there for Donny and Trina.”

“So I can go as well.” Blight spoke up, all of his usual mumbling hesitation and uncertainty gone, looking strangely at peace.

“Blight—“ Clover protested, features twisted in anguish. “Dammit, don’t you dare throw your life away.”

“Oh for crying in the woods,” Blight told her, a waspish edge of exasperation entering his voice, “I’m not aiming to get myself killed. But you’ve never needed me to this point to raise Ami. And you’ve kept me on despite everything and pretended it was OK, Chloe. But I’ve screwed up. I’ve let you down and I’ve got things to make up to other people besides you. And I’m not going to be something you keep making _allowances_ for like I’m a fucking dumb animal who can’t do better!”

Maybe it was easier for them to be in love only being together a few weeks a year—perhaps in finally being together without obstacles, the togetherness was a bit much. In that moment, the way the two of them looked at each other, Clover’s furious coffee-brown eyes and Blight’s hazel ones glittering intensely without heed or awareness of anyone else in the room, there was rather more of fury that adoration in their expressions. Cashmere honestly wasn’t sure whether to be amused at the shameless voyeurism of the little marital spat, or to be embarrassed for them.

They looked about as ready to kill each other as anything, and she sensed the crackling tension in the air as every victor in the room tensed, recognizing that deadly edge unsheathed.

Chantilly dryly quipped, “Ah, marriage is such a harmonious thing,” and a few nervous snorts and chuckles rippled through their little group. With that, the tension bled off.

“Please, Chloe,” Blight said, looking at Clover again. “I have to do this.” 

Clover looked at him for a long, long moment, and finally nodded. “But you don’t get to tell me I have to stay home, damn you.” She shook her head, closing her eyes as she laughed. “Fuck it. You sure you’re not part Two with that little honor obsession, Blight?”

Funny thing how these idiots all suddenly seemed more human to her in this one little meeting, tempers flaring and no pretension or bullshit, than they had in eleven years of mentoring. Maybe they were all stripping off the Capitol artifice and getting down to the reality beneath.

Lyme spoke up next, regarding Blight with a careful glance. “We’d be glad to bring you with us, Blight, and have you fight with us. But there are four of us already and two of them, plus I think your honor problem,” a dry little tip of her head in acknowledgment towards Clover, “is better served there?” She gestured towards Haymitch and Johanna.

Whatever was going on there, Cashmere had no clue. But by the look of it, Johanna didn’t exactly love it to bits, and Haymitch looked halfway like he’d bit down on a lemon, so she was determined to enjoy it. “Good,” Haymitch said, recovering well enough. “We’ll be fighting in Seven anyway soon. Having the both of you for that will be useful.”

“Very well,” Coin said coolly. “Arnesson, you’ll train with Abenathy and Mason—Arnesson,” she nodded to Clover, “if you join him, that will be your assignment as well. Rathbone, Donovan, Cresta, and Allemand, you’ll form the nucleus of another squad. Rathbone, there’s the matter of your replacement as regards intelligence-gathering?”

“Yes, I’d like to know who my counterpart will be,” Plutarch spoke up. Cashmere wished she could have forgotten he was here, but the prickling awareness in her that never seemed unable to dismiss a Capitolite in her presence hadn’t let her. So it was like he’d been sitting there in the manner of a coiled python, suddenly making his move now. 

“I don’t know exactly who they’re sending yet, they’ll tell me in a few days when it’s settled,” Lyme said with a curt gesture, palms turning up and hunching her shoulders in the suggestion of a shrug. “But they’re sending someone active in the Peacekeeper mole network to receive reports and help you form strategy with it. That’s all settled. And they’ll probably be far better at it than I ever was. We’ll need to arrange a retrieval for them in a week, the General said.”

“We can hardly swan right into District Two with our hovercraft unchallenged to pick them up, Rathbone,” Coin said dryly, “so I do hope your general is worth his rank and can come up with an actual plan.”

“He already gave me the pick-up coordinates in the borderlands,” Lyme said with a slight smirk of triumph. “He’ll be right by the Second Quell arena.”

“Oh, isn’t _that_ a nice piece of work,” Haymitch said dryly. “Should I go with the retrieval team so I can indulge in some nostalgia? Pick up a couple souvenirs while I’m at it—anyone want me to bring ‘em back some poison water or a little murder-squirrel? Or maybe I need to bring back a nice new tribute coffin—tradition and all. Could use a good storage trunk here anyway, because the wall hooks and dresser drawers are total crap.”

The sheer black humor got to her, as it did to the rest of them. They’d all been there, never able to bid goodbye to a Games and an arena without at least one coffin to bring back home. She’d sent her share of coffins home to awkwardly grieving parents who’d long ago lost their children as six-year-olds accepted into the Center—all they were burying now was an unfamiliar shell. As they all snickered at that, Coin looked at them like they were demented, and Plutarch looked at them like they were monsters. Perhaps they were. Nobody came out of that arena a saint, no matter how they tried to turn Katniss into one. But that subtle, invisible line had been drawn, and for once, Cashmere was on the right side of it, rather than being the butt of the jokes or scorn.

“No, Abernathy, we aren’t risking you on that mission,” Coin said, obviously grappling to regain control of things. Haymitch gave an elaborately dramatic shrug at that.

“I’ll be ready,” Boggs said simply.

“Good. Then strategic sessions to discuss upcoming operations for each of your squads will take place as you progress through training. Until then, continue your daily routine.”

Oh, lovely. Back to the steam, the breakdowns, the heat-reddened hands, and the vague mildew scent of the laundry room. On the bright side, at least it wouldn’t take her eleven years of training to get into the fight this time.

After Coin headed out, obviously dismissing them all, Johanna came up to her. Cashmere glanced at her, not above enjoying the fact that being a good four inches taller than Johanna’s five foot four, the younger woman was forced to look up to her. “You wanted something?” She smiled coolly.

Johanna shook her head, and there was a flash of teeth as she gave a grimace that was half a snarl. Cashmere’s heart seemed to skip a beat, a heady pleasure rushing through her veins at recognizing someone who’d take the bait and give her a fight. “Was that fun for you, Cash? Are you still sore that I screwed your precious Gloss? Did it skip your notice that it was a fucking _pay to view_ and I had no choice in the matter?”

“You self-centered little shit,” she said, struggling to make the anger serve her, turning her words into dagger-blows placed with care with cold precision. “You think this about Gloss? You had a brother too, didn’t you? Before he died, ever dreamed about slipping into his bed some winter night, claiming you were so cold? You snuggle up close to him, maybe your hand _accidentally_ brushes his cock…five minutes later he’s plowing you hard into the mattress and you’re screaming from it because he’s your own blood so _nobody_ can know you as well as he does. Nobody can fuck you as well as he does, nobody will ever love you as well as he does…”

“Shut _up_!” Johanna exploded angrily. “You are one twisted bitch, Cash.” Her eyes glittered with anger, but there was an edge of pain to her expression as well. Good. “I loved Bern, and if you say that about him again, I’ll kill you. I swear it.”

Cashmere actually believed her on that. “Say it about Gloss and me again and I’ll return the favor, peach. For someone whored out yourself, you’re pretty dumb. Never crossed your mind that we always hated it?” She’d been the one who cried first, after the first time it happened. That was one of the rare times that Gloss was the stronger of them, but he’d broken down too. They hadn’t touched that night because it would have brought back the immediacy of his body, his skin, his cock—the low, ashamed grunts of pleasure, his pleading, apologetic eyes right before she buried her face in the crook of his shoulder so she could pretend it away. It hurt most that she couldn’t reach out to him and hug him because that had been tainted.

“Then if it’s not about Gloss, what’s your fucking problem?”

“You didn’t hear me? _You use people_.” She shook her head impatiently. “I mean, you haven’t exactly bothered to hide it, so we all know you’ve spent the last five years fucking anyone you meet in a club to scratch the itch—“ 

“I never _wanted_ them, you arrogant piece of shit,” Johanna hissed, eyes narrow. “It was…” 

Cashmere shrugged. “Oh, I’m sure they were your own little coping mechanism.” The pictures of Johanna always had that glazed look that indicated she was tipsy or slightly high or both. But that was Johanna, lurching desperately on the ragged edge of good sense, trying to prove something by degrading others. “But at least you were just using and discarding _them_ to make your poor little feelings better. Now, before that…I was only your first little conquest to try to show Finnick, but I wasn’t your last, was I? Spark, Rye, Amaranth—did I miss any of them others? If Annie had been there, you’d probably have tried to fuck her as revenge. Screwing each other is one thing but you never wanted us. We weren’t your fellow victors, only a means to an end. You _fucked us over_ ,” she deliberately used Haymitch’s words on her, “to try to get to Finnick, and he didn’t even notice or care, did he? All you did was make an ass of yourself over a man who never wanted you. So congratulations, _Phoenix_ , you got what you wanted—the whole world’s finally telling you that you’re better than us.”

The look on Johanna’s face reminded Cashmere of a hunted animal. “I…dammit…”

She had to hammer in one last nail, gratuitous as it might seem. Maybe it was the way the man looked at Johanna since coming back from Nine. It was nothing as stupid as a blind romantic adoration, but there was a fondness and even admiration there when he thought nobody was looking. She’d been tempted to tell Haymitch that he was acting like an ass, that he was more than old enough to know better, and more than smart enough to have seen how Johanna chewed people up and spit them out, given that he’d lectured her on it. 

“So, have you fucked Haymitch yet so you can make yourself feel better that now you have no chance with Finnick? He may be past his prime in the looks department, but I did that pay-to-view with him, and take it from me, he’s got some serious skills.” The pay-to-view he’d done with Chantilly in his youth had apparently prompted people wanting to see him with the new One girl years later. Obviously friendship with Chantilly had done him a lot of good—he came across as polished, professional, well-trained in the One ways she recognized. “And by this point he’ll probably be grateful enough for it that he won’t even mind when you throw him out like all the rest of us.” Johanna looked like she’d been slapped. Oh, so had she been thinking about it?

“Cash, enough,” and Cashmere instinctively cringed at the angry disapproval in Chantilly’s voice, coming from behind her.

“We’re having a discussion, Tilly, if you don’t mind,” she said dismissively.

“You looked half ready to kill each other. You just got out of the damn arena, wasn’t that enough chance?”

“At least they’re in the infirmary if they beat the shit out of each other,” Haymitch said with an edge of sarcasm. She felt a little pang of embarrassment—dammit, she’d only meant to get through Johanna’s self-absorption. She hadn’t meant for them to overhear it. 

But she wasn’t going to apologize either. She lifted her chin instead, looked at the two of them—her mentor and the man who’d started this whole mess. “You two dragged me into this without asking. Guess Peeta and I have that in common, huh? And by taking me and leaving Gloss, you know exactly what Snow will assume from that.”

“If you wanted to be left in a Capitol cell, by all means,” Johanna began, her words hot with anger.

Haymitch gestured impatiently for her to quit it. Johanna shut her mouth. Obviously something had changed there—Cashmere had seen enough years of nobody being unable to stop Johanna’s yapping. “You’re right. We did. I’m sorry for that, but I ain’t sorry you’re not in Snow’s hands right now. And we will do everything to get Gloss back.”

There was always something inscrutable about Haymitch, a sense that even with being a hard-broken, drunk mess, most of him was still buried deep behind any number of carefully constructed masks. As a One, she could respect that, but it made him hard to know, and therefore, hard to like. Not to mention he’d become fairly pathetic in the last five years or so. But if pressed, she’d admit that opposed to everyone else who looked out for their own district first, he’d always tried in his way to look out for the rest of them and keep them from screwing each other up even more. He really he only hurt himself with the pain of being a victor, a whore, and hailing from such a chronically hopeless district as Twelve. For a victor, that kind of consideration was actually admirable. She might not genuinely like him, and some parts invited contempt, but on the whole, she could respect the majority of him.

She wouldn’t have trusted those words coming from Johanna, but from Haymitch, she might actually find them halfway credible. “I’ll hold you to it,” she told him, meeting his eyes levelly.

He gave a faint half-smile. “Good. Now if I can ask you both for a favor?” He gestured to her and Chantilly.

“You’re not in much position for asking more understanding from me, Haymitch.” 

“Then I’ll owe you even more, sweetheart,” Haymitch said coolly, “and having me in your debt? Well, that’s a nice shiny bauble to keep around.”

“Point.” To her surprise, Johanna wasn’t standing there fuming with throttled rage. Oh well, let her chew on those thoughts for a while. 

He wasted no time. “One victors are the best in Panem at spinning a whole illusion and making it pass muster. So you’re very good at seeing underneath the bullshit. I need that. Tilly, please tell me I ain’t the only one who doesn’t exactly trust the leadership here?”

“You’re not,” Johanna said dryly.

“Yes, but I need someone who can observe and report, not openly tell her to fuck herself.” He smiled dryly. “Fun as it is seeing her choke when you say it. Like it or not, you’re known as playing hardball. Though you do bring a certain…flair to the negotiation table.” Johanna smirked at that like a well-fed wolf.

“No, I don’t trust her,” Chantilly said. “Got me off the hook from being enlisted for this?”

“I did it because you can lead the ones who are staying behind, and yes, Niel and the kids will need you too,” Haymitch reminded her. There was a soft concern in his voice when he spoke to Chantilly, a sound of long familiarity that struck Cashmere. So he did actually care. Much as she tried to be cynical and think that he maybe he was hoping to use Niello’s absence to his advantage, she had to admit he’d had years to make a move.  
Chantilly nodded at that, looking at Haymitch with a calm expression in her brown eyes. “And I think she’s wary of you as a potential power, Haymitch. You’re too clever by half and she knows it. But she thinks I’m a shallow ditz too scared to go fight. She’s dismissed me as a threat. I can use that. So yeah, I’ll keep an eye on things.”

“Cash?” he queried.

“You want me to spy on—what?” she said derisively.

“Thirteen will want you to report on the situation from the field. You do that, but I’ll try to get a comm between our groups—get Beetee to whip something up off-books—so we can get honest information. You’re good at reading situations. And you’ve got two pissed-off Twos who are going to throw themselves into the fight, and a Four who’s going in hurting, even if she doesn’t have any of her episodes. You’ve got Gloss to fight for, but we all knew you were the leader of the two of you. You can be a pain in the ass, but you’re cunning and you’re reliable. So…you lead ‘em where you can, and look after ‘em.”

She stared at him incredulously, wondering exactly where he got off trying to ask that of her. As if she was somehow beholden to any of them? But he looked at her steadily, those grey eyes with that veiled look about them and giving her nothing, head cocked slightly aside as if in question.

Subtle bastard; suddenly she understood. But it was an offer, handing over rope enough either to hang herself or to climb out of the ravine. Trust placed in her, almost a challenge, and an opportunity to turn the page and write a new history that wasn’t all about shallow giggles, making love to the camera and the celebrity reporters—sometimes literally for the latter—cutting remarks, and brother-fucking. Now she read those eyes. _So you hate how bad you’ve had it? Here’s a chance. Show us all what you’re really made of._

Johanna’s gaze darted between the two of them. “You’re now our little sponsor of second chances, huh?” she asked Haymitch dryly. 

Haymitch shrugged. “Why the hell not? It’s a new world and either it flies or it goes down in flames. Might as well change what we can, while we can.” He eyed Cashmere again. “We can skip the script with me warning you about not betraying us, I assume?”

“I may not love all of you, dear, but trust me on this—there’s indifference and then there’s loathing. If I’m stabbing anyone in the back, it’s going to be Snow.”

Haymitch smiled a sudden, crooked grin, with those intent eyes looking like a wolf keen on the hunt. “If you can sell an act of turning your coat and get close enough to him for it, sweetheart, by all means.”

“Not insisting on saving him for yourself?”

“Wouldn’t mind it, but this ain’t just about what he’s done to me and mine. If he’s dead or out of play, doesn’t much matter how.” She’d certainly give Haymitch acknowledgment that he was a realist not given to self-indulgent melodrama, and she liked him better for it. “But I’ll advise you to be patient. Kill him and it won’t free your brother.”

“Fine.” She was a realist enough as well to see that this was by far her best opportunity. He was the only one to give her a choice and a chance to be more than someone else’s pawn. She wouldn't do it for him or to impress him, though. This was only for her. “Here’s the deal. I look after the pack for you and report in, you’ll stay on Coin’s tight-puckered rear about the rescue. If Thirteen and that weasel Plutarch won’t help in the end, we’ll do it ourselves.” That was no light commitment she demanded. It was a virtual suicide mission.

He had nobody in there to rescue, but she could see him start to nod, without even a flicker of hesitation. Yet before he could speak up, it was Johanna who answered, dark eyes daring Cashmere to question her sincerity. “Done.”


	19. Chapter 19

Given Haymitch’s pointed remark right when they got to Thirteen about how he had to step it up, Blight wasn’t all that surprised that Haymitch glanced at him across their empty lunch trays. “We’ve got a few minutes before we have to be up at the training gym. Got time for a quick walk with me here?”

He glanced over at Clover. “I’ve got the trays,” she assured him, a pucker of worry on her face as ever. As if, as always, she worried for him, as if he was a helpless child. Maybe this military training and the fight, the chance to protect the people he’d let down to this point, wouldn’t be enough for him to try to regain some sense of what he’d lost. Chloe never demanded explanations or answers. That was how it had always worked with them. Not much incentive to waste time with chitchat when their time every single year was so limited. Sometimes he wished she’d cast him off, yell at him, do anything but show that patient love and tolerance he didn’t deserve. 

“Fine,” he said brusquely, not exactly liking Haymitch Abernathy trying to issue orders to them, even subtly velvet-gloved. It was one thing when it was their arena alliance, but apparently Haymitch was now in the mood to show off the fact that he once again had some claws. The glances the rest of them exchanged told him precisely what they thought about him so readily answering Haymitch’s beck and call.

“So what’s this about?” he demanded the moment right they found an empty corridor. 

Haymitch turned on his heel, sized him up with a sharp, cool grey gaze, hard and unyielding as the steel walls that enclosed them. Given that the man was a good five inches shorter, Blight hated the sense that somehow, Haymitch looked down upon him. No mean trick, that, given that Haymitch’s disgrace had been so utterly public. Though if his had been more open, maybe it would have been better, because then he wouldn’t feel the shame burning beneath the skin so acutely. “Can I count on you?” he asked simply. “I know you’re doing this to make a change and fix some things, but I need to know that you’re not gonna let Johanna and Clover down.”

Everything that had happened in the last month had sawed through his sanity and his temper like gradual bites of the saw. The Games, their escape, Ami’s kidnapping, the executions, this place and all its rules and cold sterile lifelessness, the frightening expanse of a chance to be more when he had no idea if he was even capable of being a fraction of the man he needed to be. He’d never deserved Clover, in truth, and he’d fucked things up with Johanna right from the start, and Haymitch’s ruthless stare told him that this man knew it. “You don’t have any idea what it’s like for me,” he said dismissively, brushing aside of Haymitch and moving to escape.

“Oh, Clover told me what happened. It was an election year, back in 58. One fourteen-year-old girl became leverage because her mother pissed the wrong people off. A city that doesn’t value children’s lives, are we surprised? They forced you to do the dirty work. I imagine Snow approved it because the mother was possibly also one of his would-be rivals—and Aglaia Sweetwater was also one of your patrons. Gave you the choice to fuck her daughter or the girl could watch her whole family be murdered,” Haymitch said clearly, and Blight wanted to break his nose for being so level and calm about it. “So you fucked her.”

He stated it so baldly, so blandly, and Blight closed his eyes, breathing in roughly, trying to shed the visceral memory of that posh apartment. Such a girl’s room still—plush pillows, lacy bedspread, a black-and-white stuffed cat that hadn’t been knocked off the bed. A little girl’s room for the oh-so-adult business at hand, Hestia’s terrified whimpers that came through bitten lips, and the sound of Aglaia weeping in the background. “Hestia,” he said, mouth suddenly dry. “Her name was Hestia. And I asked her to make the choice.” He couldn’t be the one to make it for her, standing there aghast at what they’d just said, well aware that he couldn’t refuse it either. He still had people to protect.

Something undefinable, shuttered off, suddenly was there in Haymitch’s eyes. “It’s hardly a choice, is it? Submitting to being raped or condemning everyone around you to die. We victors know a few things about that.”

“You asshole, why are you…” Why would he want to hash over the worst night of Blight’s life? The Capitol had turned him into one of _them_ with it. He’d never forget it, couldn’t look at Clover without thinking of how filthy he was now, couldn’t look at any of the girl tributes without imagining them tearful, soul-destroyed. After what almost happened to Johanna in the arena with Dazen’s boy, after what was inevitably going to happen to her as Seven’s first female victor, he couldn’t handle it. He couldn’t do a damn thing for her. Now he had a daughter, a girl he’d never seen, and every day was a new stretch of pure terror wondering exactly what they were doing to her, and how he could have failed her even in fathering her. “You weren’t there, so don’t you dare condemn me for it.”

“No, I was lucky enough to not be tapped for that one,” he said, and Blight saw the sympathy on his face and hated it—poor, stupid, broken Blight, being pitied by the man who’d been the laughingstock of the victors for the better part of a decade. “But you’ve dropped the ball on everything since. And maybe you were forced to fuck that girl, but you sure as hell didn’t give me a choice about fucking Johanna.”

“What?” He stared at Haymitch.

“You couldn’t handle her, so you came over and totally dumped her on me. Twisted my arm with all that talk about what I owed you and the senior victors—damn you, Blight, you knew me well enough to know that and seeing otherwise the girl would be totally by herself, of course I’d do it. You _knew_ it. And you knew once she turned to me, I couldn’t turn her down. Not with what she was facing.”

“I couldn’t…” He tried to breathe in, tried to fight the rising panic and anger. “You were the only one with no juniors to look after, it was fairest…”

“You didn’t have any either except her, and she wasn’t even from my fucking district! And the girl responded to how you painted me as the one to take on everyone else’s shit. Oh, here, Johanna, meet Haymitch. He’ll play the whore for you, he’ll look after you, he’ll be there for you because I can’t do any piece at all of my fucking duty by you. You wrote her off, right when she needed people most. So I’ll ask you again—are you going to be reliable, or are you just going to mumble and back off when it gets tough?”

The image of this man at seventeen, clueless, abandoned, desperate, needful of the friendship of the other victors, still clung close in Blight’s mind. It intertwined like ivy on a tree trunk with the reality of him at forty-one now thinking to boss the rest of them around like this. The slow-stirring anger within Blight, the throttled and frustrated rage, now finally boiled over—here was a target he could strike at after all those years. It was the last bit of condescension, the last bit of treating him like an unreliable child. “Look at you, playing cocky leader throwing your weight around—like you didn’t spend all those years trying to drink yourself senseless?”

“You’re the one who left responsibility of a seventeen-year-old girl to a drunk,” Haymitch fired back sharply. “Well done.” 

“You look down on us, don’t you? Standing there looking down your nose at me right now. You’d do any damn thing for the rest of us but the moment any of us tried to help you in return, you shut yourself away again and claimed you’d manage. You think we liked knowing you didn’t trust us enough to let us _really_ be your friends after those first couple of years, or did you just want debts you could call in sometime, like right now?”

“Don’t you _dare_ compare me to Snow, you bastard.” It came out as little more than a snarl of rage. “And calling me a coward, Blight?” Haymitch said, his tone casual, but the hard glimmer of anger was there in his eyes and the tense set of his features. “That’s rich, given you dumped pretty much everything about Johanna on me, you wouldn’t let Clover help you, you’ve never even _seen_ your kid. So tell me, which of us is the bigger fuck-up? I at least swore I’d never be selfish enough to let anyone close enough to be let down by me.”

“Yeah, tell that to Katniss Everdeen, because you did so well by her in letting her boyfriend take your place and sending her in there to die totally ignorant of the strings you were pulling,” Blight said, well aware it was a cruel twist of the knife, but moved to it anyway because his temper was up, backed into a corner now as he was, unable to run from his problems anymore. Having it all out felt good, rather than Clover making excuses for his failures or everyone treating him like something pathetic and incapable. The Quell had let him fight again, let him be of some small worth, and Haymitch arrogantly standing there demanding things of him as if he’d never been a screw-up himself, was one step too far.

Two dark and damaged men that they were, in a twisted way, it seemed Haymitch still respected him enough to finally call him out openly, and so he returned the favor. He’d half-expected it, so it was little surprise when Haymitch’s fist hit his jaw, snapping his head around in a bright dizzy starburst of pain, but it was a good kind of hurt. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to lash out or take a beating, but anger and self-loathing seemed to turn so swiftly that they dazzled as one singular passion for a fight—and here was someone willing to give it to him, who seemed to need it every bit as much.

Mouthy as he was, apparently Haymitch wasn’t the sort who wasted breath on taunts and chatter when he was in a fight. Plus the fact that Blight planted his fist right in the man’s gut probably didn’t help.

He’d seen Haymitch’s skills in the Quarter Quell all those years ago, and the man’s killer edge was at razor sharpness as well right now from having been out at war in the farming districts. Age and weight slowed him down a little, though he was still faster than Blight, and obviously undaunted by fighting someone bigger than him, because the next crashing blow snapped right into his nose, followed up by a leg hooked around his knee, sending him stumbling off balance. He reached out and caught Haymitch’s shirt as he fell, though, bringing him down to the ground. He landed half on top of Haymitch, prompting a sharp _whuff_ as it drove the air from Haymitch’s lungs. Blight scrambled enough to half-pin him, planted his fist right in that annoying mouth of his before Haymitch could recover. The feel of blood on his knuckles, blood surging through his veins, felt fantastic, and so he hit him again, and again.

Though getting grabbed in the crotch, that hard grip abruptly twisting, felt far less great, paralyzing him with the sheer flare of pain. Trust a man who’d been prostituted out to other men to not be squeamish about that. He reached out, wanting to strangle the man for good, seeing red alongside the black flashes of pain. 

But Haymitch wasn’t there. Obviously he’d taken the opportunity of Blight being staggered back a bit to wriggle out from underneath him. Instead, Haymitch’s guttural, breathless laugh came from behind him. Blight turned on his knees, biting back a gasp at the throb of agony.

Haymitch leaned over, left hand braced on his knee, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his right hand, nose bleeding as well, his knuckles torn and bloody. He looked at Blight and smiled slightly. Good thing it wasn’t a toothy grin—blood on his teeth would have been an acute reminder of Snow. As was, he knelt there, half-frozen, not sure whether he was being laughed at or not. 

Haymitch’s pained grunt of “So you’ve still got balls, good, good,” had him itching for an axe for a moment. Damn brat and his mockery. Then he realized that ragged clacking wheeze was Haymitch trying to laugh, and that his hand was offered out to help Blight up. So it was teasing, not mockery. 

As he got up, his balls a red-hot explosion of agony, he fought back a pang of nausea. “You asshole, you fight dirty.” He wiped his nose, seeing that it was bleeding all over his shirt, trying to not choke on the blood now trickling down the back of his throat.

“No, I fight to win,” Haymitch corrected him with that smirk of his. Staring at it, Blight suddenly started laughing, unable to help it. Stupid as it seemed, it was like a great burden had been eased. Someone had called him out, and he’d survived it. After a moment, Haymitch joined him, clutching his ribs, leaning one hand against the wall for support. “I mean it,” Haymitch said. “I’ll help you get through as much as I can, but you need to be the one to fix things with Clover and Johanna, and be there for them, or else. I ain’t doing it all on this team if you can’t pull your weight.”

He nodded, unable to argue that. “Let me deal with Clover first.” 

“Better that way,” Haymitch acknowledged.

Before he stuffed a handkerchief to his nose, he decided to bite the bullet. If he was going to change things, might as well be honest. “I’m sorry I dumped Johanna on you.” He’d taken the easy road there, it was true. Being genuinely unable to face Johanna, particularly on her starting her career as a victor-whore, without a freak-out—that was an explanation, but not an excuse. She was from Seven. He’d owed her better. He still did. “I do think you were the best thing for her, though. You understood her. Maybe she was some good for you too, in the end.”

Haymitch looked startled, as if he hadn’t expected anything like an apology. “Maybe,” he acknowledged. “And…for Hestia. I’m sorry. You were Aglaia’s favorite, but she bought me too. It could have easily been me. If Snow was in a bad mood with me, likely would have been. One more little punishment.”

“Snow always did have a nut on for you,” Blight agreed. “Tell me, if it had been you…” He probably shouldn’t ask, but he felt compelled. If this man wanted to judge him, let him assure Blight he’d have done better.

“I’d have given her the choice, like you did.” Haymitch’s fingers clenched, blood oozing from his knuckles again. “And then I’d have crawled into a bottle for good just that much quicker.” 

“At least you only hurt yourself with that.” He hadn’t let anyone down by his failure.

“Only ‘cause I wouldn’t let anyone close enough to matter.” Haymitch sighed at that, sagged slightly against the wall as if suddenly feeling a great weight pressing down on him that he was too weary to bear. “I know Ced wasn’t much help to you either, so you almost might as well have been a lone victor for Seven. But you’re right. After a while I shut all of you out where it mattered. Even Tilly. It was easier to help people than to accept help. Always been like that for me. So you’re braver than me, taking happiness where you could, even with it being a risk.” 

“I was braver.” That man had been gone a long time, so it seemed.

“You still can be.” Now that gaze wasn’t hard, but it was steady. “She’s still alive, Clover. Still willing to stand by you. And we’ll get your daughter back. You know that.”

He nodded at that, unable to speak about it, thinking of the pictures of the brown-haired little girl he’d seen, and dreamed about with the hopeless dreams of a man who’d never have a thing and didn’t deserve it anyway. But this was the reality now. Neither he nor Clover had planned it, but Amitra was a gift, and they were lucky that Snow seemed to still not realize that he had the child of two victors in his hands, rather than the niece of a Nine victor. 

“So you tell me, can we trust you to have our backs?”

“Yes.” Blight believed him. Whether it was his nature or what Snow did to him in killing his family, Haymitch had always been the sort of man to go get himself recklessly killed for someone else rather than see them sacrificed for his sake. It made him dangerous, but not to them.

There was a good chance they’d get Ami back, and he’d be a part of her life. No more taking the easy route of telling himself he’d never have the chance to know her, and she was better off without him anyway. No more telling himself that Clover was so capable and good in comparison to him that he could only touch her when she pleaded with him, virtually on the edge of tears. No more shutting her out. It meant telling her everything and letting her judge him for the man he was, but he’d have to risk it, and tell her about the man he hoped to become for her sake. At least he and Chloe would have some time up in the woods this afternoon to talk and hopefully start that. He’d cooperate with the damn shrink too. If there was a chance to be worthy of his wife and daughter, he’d take it—and try to make some amends to Johanna while he was at it.

~~~~~~~~~~

After only a week back in Thirteen, Johanna cherished weather now, whether sunny, rainy, humid and sticky or cool and overcast—all of it was a revelation, a chance to get away from the twenty-two hours a day stuck in a giant steel box belowground and breathe some fresh air, feel the real world again. The only thing that would have given her pause was a lightning storm or jungle-worthy heat and humidity, but today it was pissing down slightly, a warm August rain, but nothing too uncomfortable.

Rifle held at the ready in his hands, Haymitch led the way through the trees, and she was mildly surprised that he obviously knew how to move through a forest. He might not have ever slept looking up at the stars, but he was better at this than her. Kids in Seven didn’t hunt beyond snares, so they learned quickly to make noise and sound noisy as a galloping moose out in the woods to help scare away predators. She was unlearning those instincts, forced herself to ignore them in the arenas. But whatever skills Haymitch had in his youth obviously were coming back to him, because even if he didn’t exactly have tree identification down beyond the stupidly obvious like birch and maple, he moved like a hunter, quietly and efficiently.

Skills—she heard Cashmere say again with a smug scorn, _Take it from me, he’s got some serious skills…and by this point he’ll probably be so grateful for it that he won’t even mind when you throw him out like the rest of us…you use people…you use people…_

The accusations had worried at her, like a splinter beneath the skin, tender and festering, for the last week. Plus he’d come back from that walk with Blight days ago with a split lip and busted knuckles, and no explanation. But he’d seemed to look at her slightly differently, and she felt him at a slight remove. Not too far away that he didn’t listen and talk to her, but something of that deep trust that had existed out on the prairie seemed to have evaporated. And whether that was due to being back around their fellow victors, overhearing Cashmere’s accusations, or something Blight had said about her to undercut her in Haymitch’s eyes, she didn’t know. She had nothing, and the vulnerability of it made her more than a little tetchy. So words seemed to explode out of her before she could think better of them. “So what is it, huh? Cashmere or Blight being full of shit or what?”

He looked back over his shoulder, something startled and almost panicky in his expression, and then suddenly it was gone, behind that guarded veil of wry sarcasm. “Given that thanks to the expectations of our lovely hosts in the Capitol _any_ victor is by definition full of shit to some degree, you’re gonna have to be a bit more specific,” he said dryly, but she’d seen it in his face—he knew exactly what she meant, was trying to avoid it as long as possible, and that was half an answer right there.

His eyes strayed down to her rifle and she realized she was clutching it tightly, as if ready for an attack. Deliberately, she leaned it back against the trunk of an old beech, standing there with empty hands and feeling peculiarly defenseless. “Did I ever just use you?” she demanded, hating Cashmere for making her have to ask, but doubt had crept in and she was unable to put her mind at ease until she had an answer. 

All those years being whored out meant he could still tightly control his emotions for the most part, but she read the flicker of alarm in his eyes, the small tic of a muscle in his cheek as if suppressing a grimace. For that moment, he looked roughly like a man standing there with a rusty iron jaws-trap shut on his foot, and the forest cats closing in at the smell of blood and fear. Then it faded, but she couldn’t pretend it away.

He didn’t say anything for a moment, his chin propped in his hand, elbow resting on his knee, looking as if he searched for the right words to make it a kind kill, rather than viciously going for her throat and tearing her to pieces. Dead was dead, though. “Guess that’s my answer,” she said flatly. “Do me the courtesy of at least _saying_ it, for fuck’s sake. I’m not a little girl, I can take it.”

“Don’t push me,” he retorted sharply, raising his head, grey eyes flashing with a steely irritation. “If I want to take a minute to answer you, you can sit the fuck down and wait if you really want to know. That’s always the problem with you when you’re squirrely about some damn thing—it has to be what you want, right when you want it. So act like a grown woman rather than a pushy kid whining in the sweet-shop.”

She inhaled swiftly, anger coursing through her veins. She’d half-expected him to answer “yes”, braced herself for it for a week now. But that attack was unexpected, tearing into soft and undefended parts. Bastard—condescending lecture like that, she’d show him. Just as she opened her mouth to tell him exactly where he could stick that crap, she saw the look of shrewd assessment on his face. The man had run her in a circle and then coolly stepped aside to watch if she’d continue running and snarling at nothing. She wasn’t going to prove him right. “At your leisure, then, though today would be real nice,” she replied, though she couldn’t resist giving the last words a slight twist of irritation.

The faintest twitch of a smile answered that, and she didn’t know whether to be amused at that or annoyed—it depended whether the joke was on her or whether she was included in it. Right now, she wasn’t sure. “Blight and I had a very nice discussion about this the other day,” he said. She glanced down to where one hand rested on his knee, the bruised and torn knuckles finally healing. “Don’t suppose he’s been by to talk to you yet?” She shook her head. “Guess he’s mending things with Clover first—can’t blame him. But if he doesn’t come to you, give it another week and then you probably ought to force him to a sit-down.” 

“OK,” she said dubiously, still not liking the sense of shadowy moving parts that she didn’t completely understand. But it was all tied together in the end, well enough that she had some idea of where it was all going. Blight’s abandonment of her, Cashmere’s accusations, and in the center of it all, Haymitch and whatever the hell he felt about things. She could only be thankful that Cashmere had no idea that she actually had slept with Haymitch once already, or that would have been used to rip into her even harder.

“So it starts with him bringing you to me and twisting my damn arm right in front of you, so—if there’s any blame for it, he bears the bigger part.” It wasn’t exactly absolution, and as much as part of her wanted to snap at him, defend herself vehemently, she had the sinking feeling that to do so would mean losing him. He hesitated, glanced aside for a moment. “Tell me something. If you’d met me up in Mentor Central like you did all the others, if the first thing you hadn’t heard on meeting me was Blight more or less saying, ‘Oh, he’s been a whore for years and he’ll look after you’, would you still have asked me to sleep with you?”

She couldn’t breathe for a moment, not certain whether she was being attacked or not. There was a sudden aura of awkwardness to him—eyes glancing aside from hers, a slight hunch to his shoulders. She tried to think about it, much as she’d done her best to shut out that stupid, scared little girl. “No,” she said finally, thinking of Chaff and other contemporaries of his that she’d met soon after. If she’d met him up there, a grown man she’d seen on television since she was a child, he would have been an imposing figure, rendered almost untouchable and asexual from her sheer respect for his seniority—much like Blight was, even before she found out how cowardly he really was. That meant of the two men there that afternoon, Haymitch was the only real choice. “You were…I was desperate, damn you, and you were…”

“Convenient,” he supplied. One simple word, but she closed her eyes, hearing all manner of condemnation in those three clipped syllables, real or imagined. “I was already a whore, so of _course_ it wouldn’t matter to me, would it?” 

It wasn’t in her to simply take it and not defend herself, though. So she opened her eyes and forced herself to look at him. “Did it matter? I’ve seen enough since to have a hell of a lot of perspective, and we both know you weren’t exactly enjoying it.” It was a nasty hit, but it was out of her mouth before she could stop it.

“How would I have enjoyed it, praytell? I was having sex with a terrified teenage girl I’d just met, who clearly asked me to do it only because my esteemed District Seven colleague had introduced me not as her senior victor, but as _a fucking professional_. No pun intended.” Now she heard the first hints of anger in his tone, like dark storm clouds brewing on the horizon, menacing but not yet unleashed. “You were desperate and I was your best option given what you’d been through that last summer. I know that. I knew it then. But damn you, all that shoved on me by both you and Blight, it wasn’t like either of you gave me the chance to say no.”

“Of course you could have said no, asshole, I didn’t hold a fucking gun to your head,” she snapped, furious beyond words that even subtly he would ever compare her to Snow. Her fingers curled up, nails digging into her palm, and whether it was to make a fist to strike him or to bleed off the anger and restrain herself from actually doing it, she wasn’t quite sure. 

“Oh, sure, then I’d send you on your merry way to Gaius Luna—my first was a Capitolite, I _know_ how that shit does to you—and know that I’d been selfish enough to deny you one little saving grace, especially after what Dazen’s boy tried to do to you in the arena.” He shook his head, hints of impatience marking his expression, tight-jawed and hard-eyed. “There’s far more ways of pressure than blatant threats, Johanna.”

She had to give him that—he was right. But she felt like she was buffeted from every side by conflicting emotions. Wanting to tell him to go to hell, wanting to run away from the whole discussion, wanting to apologize, wanting to yell at him for his fucking passive-aggressive tactics after it happened. “Fine. Cards on the table?”

“By all means.”

“Say it plain as you want.”

“It’s changed lately. These last few weeks—it’s been very different. I think we’d both agree on that?” She nodded cautiously at that. “But for years, I don’t think I was never really a victor to you. Someone you respected. I was a whore and you treated me like one that day. And after that, you’d always looked at me as the first person you could impose upon when you had troubles.”

“Sure, when I could actually pester the great lofty Haymitch Abernathy. Pushed me away after you slept with me, made it clear I was a nuisance, huh?” Attacked, she fired back, but she couldn’t deny the words once she said them. It had hurt to have him so casually dismiss her.

“You were seventeen and scared shitless. I was a thirty-three-year-old burnout at that point. Once was understandable, but after that, I would have been taking advantage of you.” Being only a couple weeks shy of twenty-six herself now and pulling herself out of the hurt anger of the child she’d been that day, she could admit maybe he had a point there.

“You also didn’t want to do it.”

“No.” He looked at her directly, gaze not wavering now. “I played the whore for you once because the alternative if I didn’t was worse. But that was enough. You were better off with a kid your own age—even if it didn’t turn out with Finnick. And there were other ways for me to try to support you.”

“Yeah, but how the fuck do you think I felt?” she demanded. “The first man who’d ever kissed me, who’d actually been kind enough to make the sex good—he obviously didn’t want me. How was I supposed to think it wasn’t something wrong with _me_?” Her pride and her soul had been as bruised as her body from the rapes that had followed being with him, and seeing the difference, she’d desperately wanted that comfort again, a kind touch and soft, reassuring words.

He sighed at that, rubbing his hands over his face. “I’m sorry. I wish…fuck, I wish that it was different for you. I’d been there. I never wanted it to be like that for anyone else.” She’d never let herself imagine him, seventeen and scared as she’d been, abused, ashamed. She’d never let herself think much about him like that, period, because it terrified her. She could see the slippery slope she was on but felt helpless to stop it, and seeing Haymitch was staring at the end of that directly and being sure that she’d end up as broken as him. Thinking about him as a teenager meant only being able to trace his own decline more directly. It had been so much safer to imagine him as always being like he’d been when they met. But he’d told her about things these last few weeks, and she couldn’t unlearn that, or lose the image that those words had created. 

“I wish it was different for you,” she answered, actually meaning it. “You want to talk about…” Hesitant and awkward in offering, she still felt like she ought to give him that opportunity.

“No, not really. This isn’t about that. ” He said it so casually, as if it hadn’t mattered to him.

She couldn’t help but bristle at him being so matter-of-fact. “So it’s OK for you to fault at me for using you for sex when I was pure out of options, and OK for you to be so upset what happened to me, but for you, you can’t even get angry at the people who abused you for years and years?” She wanted to reach out and shake him, grab him by his shoulders and keep at it until he finally snapped and gave her some reaction. “Like you don’t deserve to be angry about it, only because it’s you. Damn you! They raped you, over and over, and don’t try to convince me you don’t remember it or that it didn’t matter, that you weren’t humiliated and hurt and terrified, that you don’t wake up at night still feeling them touching you—“

“ _Enough_ ,” he practically roared the word, and she looked at him and saw that he was shaking, white-knuckled, eyes wide and teeth gritted. “Happy now?” he spat.

She refused to back down on it this time. “This is what you _do_ , Haymitch. It’s what you always did. You turn turtle and just shut up and take it, and that’s the end of it. For fuck’s sake! Get angry for yourself for once. You had it worse than just about anyone.” 

“What was the point,” he said, some of the dangerous tension in him easing off, “when nobody was there to listen?”

“I’m listening,” she dared him, sensing that trying to get him to talk now that the door was slightly open might actually yield something for once. Oddly, seeing him angry, smoldering with temper, felt less risky than the cold amusement or indifference he’d pretended for so many years. The rage was honest.

“I’d rather not hash this out now,” he said, obviously picking his words with care. “It’s not about what they did to me, or you. It’s about you _and_ me. One thing at a time?”

All right, it wasn’t so much avoidance as reasonably not wnting to sidetrack. She nodded. “But you’ll talk about it. With me or the shrink, whoever.”

“Fair play—so long as you agree to do it too,” he retorted. “Snapping someone’s head off isn’t the same as talking about it.”

“Fine.” She couldn’t keep up with the person she’d been. That much was clear. Much as the thought of changing, opening up and being judged, terrified her, it seemed to be the only way. But if she handled this right, maybe he’d stay by her. Maybe she wouldn’t be alone.

He sighed, spread his hands palm up in a helpless gesture, let them turn over and fall back to his knees. “Still, no wonder you came back to me. I’d been there. I knew even then what you wanted was comfort, with what you’d been through. All the more reason for me to turn you down for sex, though. It wasn’t me you wanted. It was just the way I made you feel.”

“Yes.” She couldn’t deny that. “I felt…safe with you that day,” her voice coming through a tight throat at admitting something like that so openly. “So after Luna, after the others, I needed…” The words failed her. She’d needed so damn much, and to have him patiently but emphatically reject her, keep her at arm’s length, had made her wonder what the fuck was wrong with her, right when she’d felt so dirty and ashamed already.

“I know.” His tone was gentler now, but not in a way that made her bristle. “But trust me, you didn’t need me to fuck you again. What you needed wasn’t more sex from me. If you wanted sex, it needed to be with someone your own age—I had Chantilly, you had Finnick, for a time. And there was no way I could keep you safe either. I didn’t have much of anything left to give to anyone at that point.” Considering fucking hadn’t made her feel all that much better since, maybe he had a point. “But after that, you never quit seeing me like that. It was always you coming to me for something when you felt down.”

“You never let anyone _see_ you needing anything,” she fired back, feeling on more firm ground here. “All you’d ever let me be was your drinking buddy and fellow fuck-up. Would you ever have asked me for anything, as a friend? You wouldn’t even ask me or anyone else to look after your damn kids last year for a couple hours when you were so exhausted you nodded off at your console—hell no, you let _Chaff_ do the asking for you.”

A momentary spark of temper flared in his eyes, but he obviously tamped it down and nodded in a tight motion. “That’s fair. Blight called me out on it too.”

“You shut me out then.” It sounded like he’d resented her a bit. “So I learned that I had to come barging in to get anywhere with you.” She might not like the answer, but felt compelled to ask, “Would you rather I have left you alone entirely?”

“No,” he said, voice rasping with emotion. “No, I’d…the old friends I had, the rest of them all had other people that mattered more. I had…” Like he’d said, for as meaningful as the other victors had been to the two of them, they were simply a small blip each summer. “You turned into one of the few people I had,” he said softly. “Maybe if you’d been just another junior mentor introduced to me up in Mentor Central, even one with a dead family, we’d have been only nodding politely to each other all these years. I don’t know. And maybe I needed you to push me ‘cause I didn’t know how to ask.” He gave her a faint, faded smile. “Only a little, though.”

For a moment that caused a small swell of warmth within—if she’d done him wrong, it seemed at least he accepted responsibility for his own part in the whole mess, and maybe he even forgave her. But then she came crashing back down to earth. “So fucking Cashmere’s right,” she said tiredly. “I used you. And then later I used Cashmere, and Spark, Amaranth, Rye…you always kept trying to tell me that, didn’t you? We don’t fuck over our own. But I did. I was so caught up in my own shit…”

She’d met with the shrink twice already that week, Doctor Aurelius, and it still felt like his questions prodded and poked coldly at her, making her draw even more tightly into a defensive ball to protect herself. She hated that he even was aware about her being whored out, because now he could use it against her. She’d have to find a way to manage it, given that Coin had clearly made it a demand. But she caught herself, looking at Haymitch. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not dumping this on you. I’m not your fucking pain-in-the-ass burden anymore.” She wouldn’t use him again because she was miserable and angry.

Sitting there on the log, cheeks burning with shame and trying to figure out how the hell she’d deal with everything now that it seemed she’d burned all her bridges, she didn’t know where to turn. The great Phoenix of Panem—the woman nobody actually liked. She felt a soft touch on her shoulder and instinctively turned towards it, a sliver of hope in her despite her determination. She couldn’t bear to look up at him, so her gaze stayed on the open vee of his shirt at his throat, the hint of white undershirt beneath. “You’re not a kid anymore, and these last weeks—you’ve stepped up. So I’d like to think,” he said, words hesitant at first, “we’ve gotten past what’s already done. That it’s more than me just feeling responsible for you and both of us needing someone who won’t judge. That we’ve been…”

“Friends,” she said, summoning enough courage to put the word out there. “Friends, for true.” She couldn’t keep talking to his shirt buttons, though, so she forced herself to look up. “So d’you trust me?” she asked, watching his face as she asked it.

“With my life? Yes.” He answered that without a flicker of hesitation. “With the rest? More than I do anyone else, let’s put it that way. And that…it ain’t you, it’s…just talking about it, that’s not easy.”

“I know.” He struggled to express it, but she got what he meant. Trying to put it to words, after so many years of stuffing it down and left to endure in silence and solitude, wasn’t easy. Both of them had forgotten somewhat how to talk to another person. But they’d tried, out there on the warpath. She wouldn’t easily forget his hand in hers during the propo either, and the way he’d held on to her after. Simple human comfort, given and accepted—perhaps that, more than anything, said how they’d both changed already.

“We’ve both fucked up more than a little. We’re not near as good as we’d like. But maybe there’s a chance to be different now.”

She wouldn’t look away now. “I need you,” she said, trying to keep her voice from breaking as she said it, because for so many years she’d told herself she didn’t need anyone. People had become tools to her, to use and discard, because she wouldn’t let anyone matter enough to hurt. She couldn’t be like that anymore. The Phoenix and her camera-glossy image be damned—the reality of Johanna Mason didn’t want to be like that. “I need one person to stay by my side that I know for sure I can trust. To…to have my back, and to be honest with me about things. Because it’s still too easy for me to go back like I was.” His words had stung. But maybe now she was old enough, and out of the self-absorbed cocoon of her own anger and pain, to really hear what he was saying. If he’d stay like that, given her the respect of honesty like a fellow adult and a friend, rather than retreating from her into his own cold silence and treating her like a kid he put up with out of obligation, then they’d both be better off for it. For her part, she’d try to never take him for granted again. 

He didn’t answer right away, looking pensive, arms folded across his chest. “I’m asking,” she said, panicking now that he’d feel she forced him into another corner by telling him that he was her only option. “You can say no. And they can call you whatever they want for the PR, my ‘chief advisor’ or ‘right-hand man’ or whatever, but trust me, to me…we’re partners in this. I promise you that. I’m not a kid like I was then, and I’m not Katniss, Haymitch. I don’t need you to be my mentor.” Maybe that had been the problem. She couldn’t decide, in all those years, whether she wanted him to be the mentor Blight wasn’t, or a friend.

She noticed the momentary pain in his eyes at the mention of Katniss, but it had to be said. She had to be certain that she wasn’t stepping right into a dead girl’s shoes for him. But he recovered. Those eyebrows went up and he smiled wryly at her. “I’d say after seeing us at work, we make a good team. Be a shame to break that up. Although, really, let’s please skip me being your ‘right-hand man’?” The eyebrows waggled and he moved his half-clenched right hand up and down in a few motions, mimicking jerking off, and she couldn’t help but laugh at that, relieved that he could joke with her. 

But then his expression sobered. “Thanks,” he said simply. There was a world of things unsaid in that simple word, but she understood him loud and clear. 

Carefully, she reached out, her fingers lightly touching the back of his hand, waiting to see if the gesture would be accepted, wanting him to be the one who made the first move. He turned his hand over, her fingertips brushing his palm, and took her hand in his, fingers clasped in his. She could feel the calluses there still from the reins from their time riding the prairie. “Welcome,” she answered him softly, tipping her head back slightly to breathe in the air that suddenly seemed all the sweeter.


	20. Chapter 20

After Haymitch asked Blight for a little post-lunch chat, they all had to get to work. For Blight, that meant Supply with Chaff. For Clover, that meant reporting to the kitchens. She tried hard to not think too much about what she was doing, and how what she cooked barely seemed to qualify to her as food. Nine was poor and food was scarce, given that the Peacekeepers watched close to make sure people weren’t sneaking into the fields and lopping off a dozen ears of corn. But during harvest for wheat or barley or oats or rye, sneaking a single handful of raw grain became common practice, and she’d seen Peacekeepers deliberately overlook it, probably sensing that working fourteen or sixteen hour days, they’d needed the calories. In corn and soybean harvest, if some less than ideal ears or pods disappeared, that got overlooked as well, and if they didn’t eat well, they ate enough to keep going. 

Even the yield monitors on the combines couldn’t keep up with that small a loss. She could still recall the toughness of raw grain, not milled or soaked or softened in any way, and the sour, bitter flavor of barley in particular. She’d always hated barley harvest because of that. But during harvest, everyone felt full for once, because that single handful would swell in their stomachs. The stupid ones ate too much and the grains grossly distended their stomachs. Hard to chew, hard to swallow, and it usually gave everyone constipation like hell. But they needed the food to keep going during those days. 

Here in Thirteen, there was no such quiet understanding. Everyone got exactly what the government prescribed and no more. And standing there, reading the sheet for the day that specified the exact breakdown of protein, calcium, fiber, vitamins, and all the rest that made for the daily requirements, was dry enough. But opening cans and rehydrating dried vegetables, meat, fruit, reaching for ancient jars of spices that held no more than a ghost of their original flavor, she tried to not think, _This isn’t food._

Maybe she’d gotten a little spoiled as a victor. She could admit that. But even living hard as a girl on Lakeshore Collective, they’d found what small pleasures they could. The taste of barleywine, a summer dance once the planting was done, a good crop stretching as far as the eye could see, and the certainty of friends and neighbors who’d have each other’s backs. It seemed like everything here in District Thirteen was equally joyless as the food.

Life in District Nine had its rhythms. District Thirteen had only routine. And that made all the difference.

Right before their time up on the surface for the afternoon, Blight came into their room walking gingerly, almost as if he was straddling a row of wheat wide-legged and shuffling his way down it. His raw knuckles and the bruise blossoming on his jaw spoke eloquently as well. 

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t ask. In her years with Blight, she’d gotten used to not asking, because perhaps some part of her was well aware that in doing so, she might break him. It broke her heart a little all the same that he hid himself away from her, this man she’d loved for years, who’d fathered her daughter. But then the Games had always kept them to halfway measures anyway. She was from Nine and he was from Seven, and three or four weeks a year among the nightmare of the Games was the only time they’d ever have. She’d tried to warn Johanna about that, seeing the stars in the girl’s eyes about Finnick. Been rebuffed, of course—and even old Ced had politely kept his own counsel. Was it something about District Seven that made them claim to not need anyone? 

She’d seen him stand and fight in the arena, fierce as she remembered him being in the 44th Games, with no notion that her turn would come the next year. Perhaps she’d been stupid to think that fresh spark, and their being here in Thirteen, could be a new start. They’d signed the marriage papers and moved in together. Nothing much had changed, except the prickling awareness of each other. The careful, silent way of being about things didn’t change.

If she were someone else, maybe she’d confront him and demand he talk about it. She’d tried all those years ago, telling him it wasn’t his fault. What horrors they forced him to do weren’t on his head. He slipped away from her all the same and never came back. He’d respond when she made a move, but it was always on her. But he was hers. She wouldn’t be Capitol, abandoning him simply because he wasn’t the bluff, laughing man she’d fallen in love with years ago.

But his passiveness had reached a point too far now if he let Haymitch give him a beating and simply took it. She kept her temper in check until they reached the surface, but finally it burst forth. She turned on him, looking up at him, though of course he wouldn’t meet her gaze for more than an instant. “If you aren’t going to fight back and kick his ass, Blight, I damn well will. He’s gotten mighty big for his jeans all of a sudden if he thinks he can thrash you for— _what?_ What part of his great plan did you supposedly fuck up?” Granted, she’d liked Haymitch ever since she met him so long ago, cheeky little brat that he was, though she was grateful now that he hadn’t taken her up on her single offer to him the night after his first time with a patron. It would make it more awkward now to want to kill him if she’d ever fucked him. 

He glanced away, as she expected, but to her shock, then he looked back. Looked right at her with those hazel eyes in a way he hadn’t in years. “He yelled at me that I’d foisted Johanna off on him, I told him at least I hadn’t gotten her killed like he had with Katniss, and he popped me in the jaw.” He shrugged slightly. “I deserved that.”

“Nobody deserves to get hit,” she said, shaking her head, ready to go holler at Haymitch right that moment if need be. 

“Well, I hit him right back more than once. Had him dead to rights, actually, till he got me in the crotch.” Blight winced at that.

“And I suppose after you got done beating each other, you’re good friends again?” She tried to not snort in exasperated amusement and failed. “ _Men_.” Pack of blustering idiots. 

Her humor swiftly faded as she realized that for a few moments it had been like old times. They’d talked to each other without the awkwardness. He’d been _there_. And it had been Haymitch that got through to him, rather than her, and as she looked at him it was as if she could see him slipping away from her again, silent as a ghost. All those years she’d stood by him, supported him, and instead getting his ass kicked by a fellow victor was what did it. “So I never needed to try to understand. Or stand by you, sleep with you, tell you I loved you. Do I need to punch you too? If we have a good fistfight rather than sex, will you look at me? Stay with me and not go away again?” she demanded. This wasn’t how she did things. A Nine child grew up farming. That meant they recognized two things: a lot was out of their control, and the distant view was needed. No point getting furious about a hailstorm, and the ups and downs of a month, a season, a year, meant nothing in the long run. 

Jagged and hotly confrontational wasn’t her way—that was for the likes of Cashmere and Johanna. All those years ago in the arena, she won mostly by patience—it hadn’t mattered that she only had a rough broken tree branch club to start, and then she “accidentally” broke the unwieldy pitchfork a sponsor sent her and turned it into a spear and some crude knives. She’d deliberately chosen her battles, so that she was the one who surprised the Careers rather than the other way around. The Capitol had so loved that she’d killed the watcher, the Four boy, when he got complacent and stepped away from camp to take a piss, and then crept around the shadowed fire-circle quietly to take care of all the rest.

Maybe she should have been more aggressive about it. But even as her heart ached with the pain and the anger, her calm inner self sheltered from the storm like a seed beneath the soil and admitted that she would have driven him away if she’d turned on him and made demands. Perhaps she’d have even made him worse. Bad enough to have a man who thought he wasn’t worthy of her anymore, but that was more the pain of being unable to reassure him. Far worse to have driven him to some extreme by him feeling like she’d rejected him and carry that guilt. But so long as he hung on to life and never closed himself off from her and told her it was over, that meant there was some small spark alive within him that hoped he’d someday prove himself worthy again, didn’t it? 

“Oh, for crying in the woods…Chloe.” The way he said her name caught her attention. He said it without the air of apology, that unspoken _I’m sorry you picked me, I’m sorry I’m not good enough for you._ “It’s not just about Johanna, though. I’ve let you down all these years too.”

Her first instinct was to shake her head and deny it, but really, she couldn’t. “I’m tired of that,” she told him, throat aching now as she tried to hold back the tears. “I never wanted to be your princess on a pedestal, Blight. I just wanted to love you and have you love me.” 

“I’m sorry,” he said again, as if he had only a limited number of responses to give and he’d cycle through them all given half the chance. _I’ve let you down. I’m sorry. I’m not good enough. I’ve failed again. It’s my fault._

She breathed out, trying to give herself a few moments to collect her thoughts better. “We couldn’t have much before. We both knew that.”

“But we got less than we should, even so,” he said regretfully.

She shook her head, unable to deny that he was right, but seeing where he was going, trying to veer off the same damn cliff. She had to handle this with care, and walk that straight and narrow row between trying to grab him too close and pushing him away instead, or being too distant and letting him walk away. If he left her again in his mind, the memory of him actually looking at her, open and earnest, would haunt her for far too long. “None of us really had any choices.” The memory of him that night, weeping for that teenage girl whose life was now ruined, stayed with her. He’d been as forced as the girl because Blight was just a convenience to Snow, a tool that could be used with impunity because he was already well-collared. “What you did…”

“Stop making excuses for me, Chloe,” he said, voice oddly gentle, but the words spoken with determination. “Maybe I did the best I could with it then. But I didn’t do well with it ever since. I need to…deal with it.”

“And how do you plan to do that?” she asked. Hopefully not by putting a bullet in his head—she couldn’t bear that thought.

He sighed, broad shoulders sagging, big hands resting on his knees as he leaned back against a tree trunk. “Get some help, I suppose.” He raised his head, peering at her from beneath the unruly dark brown hair that had grown too long again and fell into his eyes. “You’re my wife.” He said it in a tender way that made her ache. “And you’ve stood by me all this time. But it’s not your job to fix me, Chloe. So I’ll talk to the shrink.”

They’d only had each other so long, all the victors, that for him to turn to someone else, alien and unknown, felt oddly like a rejection at first. But it passed in a few moments. The world was changing day by day. The truth was out there now about Snow’s selling them off. There might be people they could trust out there who hadn’t been through the crucible of the arena. She nodded at that, relieved, heart a little more at peace. “Don’t go away from me again,” she said, willing her voice to not crack. “When it’s all over, we’ll finally have a chance to have everything we haven’t all these years.”

For now, that meant a shared cubicle, stark and depressing. But he’d signed the papers, and she’d heard him argue with Coin about Ami. He’d fought that small fight for his daughter. She stepped forward and reached out, touching his hands with hers, grasping them. Perhaps she should have waited for him to make the first move, but she couldn’t. 

But he surprised her again with how he drew her in. Carefully, as if telling himself it was all right, but he held her all the same. She hadn’t had to make him try to forget himself, hadn’t had to use her body as a wordless plea. 

“I’m sorry too,” she said. “I should have…I figured that at least I’d have a little bit of you, even if I couldn’t claim her.” He could have blamed her for it. Neither of them had intended it. She’d figured past forty as she was, she was getting too old for a child. But the 71st had run long and her shot must have expired, and she’d coaxed Blight into bed right before the end, because once he was caught up in the moment, he could be the man she remembered and loved. But the choice had been hers alone. She couldn’t have gotten an abortion without Snow knowing, but she could have tried whatever the apothecary had on hand. She hadn’t. So when she came back to the 72nd, showing Blight pictures of her newborn “niece” Amitra, he’d known right away. She’d done the best thing she could for her daughter and asked Milleta and Teff to take her. She wouldn’t doom her baby–no, their baby, when had she gotten so used to thinking of doing everything alone?—by letting Snow know that she existed, that there was a two-victor child out there for him to use as another tool in his plans.

Her sister had gone along with the ruse, faked the last months of pregnancy herself, and if nobody noticed Clover in seclusion that spring, that was nothing new. Not like she was permitted to help with planting anyway. Even if every time she visited Leta and Teff and saw those hazel eyes above a bright smile she grieved a little inside, and grieved even more to see Ami playing with the carved wooden toys that Blight had sent to Ami as well as to Barl and Alfie, that was nothing new. She’d had only the barest part of a husband, why not only a barest part of a child? 

“It’s not your fault,” he told her. “You did what you could with her.”

“And now that fucking maniac has her.”

“I don’t think he knows what he has, though,” he pointed out. “He thinks she’s your niece still.”

She shuddered still, trying to not imagine what they were doing to her baby—she was only three years old now, far too young to understand anything of what had happened. Perhaps she hadn’t been able to raise Amitra to this point, but she couldn’t avoid thinking as a mother would, full of fear. “All I can think,” she told him, fingers gripping his shirt tightly, relieved to not have to bear it all alone, “is that she’s scared. Maybe they’re hurting her.” 

“We’ll get her back,” he promised, chin resting on her shoulder, his voice soft in her ear. “We’ll fight together, you and me, and help win this war. And whatever it takes, we’ll get her back. Our little girl. She deserves a father. You deserve a husband. A real one.”

A quiet peace came over her to hear that. “But it won’t be just the three of us,” she warned him, compelled to be honest. If he wanted off this train, best that she know it now.

Pushing her back a step, he looked at her with wide-eyed confusion. She couldn’t help but laugh. “No,” she told him, “not that.” But the humor faded—thinking of Ami always brought up memories of Leta and Teff, shot down in cold blood. They’d died with Ami still kept a secret, but they’d died for no reason except their tie to her. In the end her sister had done far more for Clover than Clover had for her. Odd reversal of their younger years, when Clover was always the leader, being four years older. But she hadn’t been able to protect Leta in the end, had she? “Alfalfa and Barley,” she told him, calling to mind the two of them—Alfie’s gap-toothed grin, Barl’s mischief, and how much they both looked like Leta—and Clover—with their dark brown eyes and light brown hair, like a ripe shock of wheat. “Leta’s boys. Alfie’s six and Barl’s nine. She raised my daughter until they murdered her. When we get Ami back, I owe it to her to take her sons in and raise them as my own.”

“Ours,” he corrected her, not even hesitating. He kept hold of her tightly. “I won’t leave,” he promised her. 

With that, she closed her eyes, relieved, feeling as if the burden lifted from her shoulders. It wouldn’t be instantaneous change with him. He couldn’t will away all the bad crap that had taken deep root in his mind. But he would try, for her and for Ami, and the boys he’d claim as his own. The good man within hadn’t been entirely broken. The seeds were planted now, and she’d do her best to help them grow. After all, anyone raised a farm girl could be patient until something came into its proper time and season.

~~~~~~~~~~

Haymitch sat on the worn old couch for his session with the shrink. He supposed it said something that Aurelius had that rather than the uncomfortable seating that went in everywhere else in District Thirteen. Plus he had it in spades over Snow, who made people stand up, in front of Snow looking down on them from behind that desk on its high dais, merely to make them uncomfortable. But no matter how comfortable the couch might be, wasn’t like he could relax. Aurelius sat there looking at him patiently, not a single tap of the pencil or twitch of the foot as he waited. It unnerved Haymitch still. That kind of stillness readily put him in mind of either a reptile or a corpse, but the man’s eyes were friendly and his expression interested. The stillness was meant to not startle him. Whether that was because he was a victor, or if Aurelius was like this with everyone, he wasn’t sure.

Yeah, he’d acknowledged the need for it, but he couldn’t just make himself into a damn open book in the space of a few days. At least Aurelius seemed surprisingly sensitive to that, figuring out the questions to ask to open a particular door, and which ones were best left closed for the moment. Persistent as a tunneling badger, and Haymitch wasn’t dumb enough to think that the man wouldn’t get it all out of him eventually, but at least he felt like he had a little choice in the matter. Aurelius didn’t simply _take_. But he wouldn’t give it up freely, for all that. He wasn’t ready for that, didn’t trust Aurelius that much, couldn’t guarantee that he ever would.

"Who said I have nightmares?" he demanded irritably after the last comment.

"You were under observation, Abernathy. It was clear you experience night terrors if you’re not medicated." Who’d tattled? Someone who’d watched him while they were out on the prairie? He could guarantee Chaff hadn’t sold him out—was there a camera in his room? He wished that notion could send a chill down his spine, but oddly, it didn’t. After all, he’d spent his entire adult life being watched.

Two could play at this shit. Haymitch just stared at him in turn, determined to make Aurelius work for it. This was his life and his mind was the only privacy he’d ever had. They’d killed his family, forced him to beg for help for doomed kids every year and watch them die, sold his body, broken his pride, taken everything that mattered. They weren’t getting this from him without a fight.

"So what do you dream about, when it’s not nightmares?” Aurelius questioned, eyes mild behind his glasses. Probably trying to distract him and turn it to a less touchy subject, but it made him bristle all the same, simply because he’d blundered right back into painful territory.

"Oh, the usual stuff a single man thinks about. Threesomes, women that want to be seduced or call me ‘Daddy’, you know," he said, shrugging and putting his hands behind his head, trying for the very picture of nonchalance. "The best fucks I’ve had in the last ten years have all been in my head, unfortunately."

Truth be told, that featured in his nightmares too. Threesomes, grown women and men who wanted to play school-age virgins, the smell of sex and greedy eyes and grasping hands, the nauseating sound of his name in a Capitol accent. Those dreams came out to play right along with candy-pink birds, the slippery feel of his own entrails, and the smell of rotting blood ingrained into his very skin; or the seemingly endless parade of the deaths of all those tributes he could never have saved.

"Is that really what you dream about, Haymitch?" Aurelius asked, voice carefully neutral.

No, not really. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d dreamed about sex. It was one more thing the Capitol had taken from him and ruined. And then with the alcohol numbing everything comfortably and how nothing really mattered at all, mustering the effort to even care about sex he wasn’t having just didn’t seem worth it.

Now and again, when he wasn’t dreaming about mutts or dead kids or the smell of burning flesh in that old Seam house or being fucked, Haymitch dreamed about breakfast, of all things.

He’d been a fair cook once, since he’d had to learn to do for himself. Back then, food was one of the few comforts he had, a small pleasure when everything else was gone. He’d learned only later that alcohol took the hurt away much more decisively, but he was young then, and cooking became a challenge as well as a comfort, something to occupy his mind. Young enough that when he was twenty, he got friendly notification from Snow two months prior to the Games that he had best lose some weight before Reaping Day “for his health”. The implied or else was there. Had to keep the patrons happy, they didn’t want their whore to be chubby, and if Snow couldn’t sell him, someone would pay. It told him plenty fifteen years later when he didn’t get cracked down on again once the weight piled on thanks to the booze. He was used up by that point, all the supposedly shining promise tarnished up, and nobody cared about an ageing, fat drunk embarrassment.

So he dreamed about breakfast. Windows open in the kitchen to let in the morning sunlight, and the slight breeze in a sticky midsummer morning—July or early August, when he ought to be in the Capitol, but there he was instead, cooking breakfast in his kitchen. The walls weren’t faded and peeling, the curtains weren’t sad and limp and yellowed. Eggs and bacon sizzled merrily in the old cast-iron pan—he could hear it, smell it, his mouth watering a little as he anticipated tasting it, watching the bacon crisp up and the eggs cook. Toast, golden brown and spread with just a little butter, and a crock of blueberry jam sitting beside it, coffee brewing in the pot too.

A woman’s voice mumbled “Morning” behind him, still so thick with sleep he couldn’t tell the accent aside from it not being Capitol and making his skin crawl. Arms wrapped around him from behind, squeezing him in a greeting hug as he worked the eggs in the pan.

He was in a kitchen that wasn’t a faded mess, because he wasn’t a faded mess. In his dream, he was thinner, younger, sober, and he didn’t automatically turn in terror on anyone who grabbed him from behind with a knife in hand. He was a man a woman actually might want to touch, a man who might have a woman who shared his bed every night and came downstairs for breakfast, touching him with that kind of casually intimate affection.

He didn’t know if that dream-wife was short or tall, thin or plump, fair or dark, pretty or plain, merchie or Seam or even from another district. He never turned around to look at her. If he did she’d disappear, because she wasn’t there. Even his delusional dreaming brain knew it couldn’t be real.

So he never turned. He just kept cooking their meal, letting her hold him like that and savoring the feel of it, sometimes even long past the point the food should have burned. But it was his dream, so it never did. Inevitably he finally woke up, a shitty wreck of a man alone in his bed, curling in on himself against the sudden feeling of hollowness. He’d rather have dreamed of fucking and woken up with a raging erection. A couple minutes in the bathroom would cure that ache. Only the alcohol drowned this one, and Thirteen made sure that wasn’t an option now.

No, they weren’t getting that from him. Not yet—maybe not ever, with that particular dream and everything he secretly treasured about it. He looked at Aurelius and said, matter-of-factly, “Bacon, actually. I dream about a real breakfast.” He’d never talk about the wistful dream of being a man worth a woman’s time. He smirked. “Can’t blame a man for that. The food here is crap. You ever had real bacon? Coffee?”

“I was born here in Thirteen,” Aurelius said softly. That was answer enough.

“Mm. Not like growing up in the worst part of Twelve did much either. I didn’t have a lot of foods either until after the Games. Kill some kids, get your family murdered, eat great for the first time in your life—after my intestines settled back down again after they tried to become external accessories.” He shrugged. “Might as well enjoy the food, if it comes at that high a price, right?”

“Haymitch,” Aurelius said, “you’re getting defensive. I imagine food was one of the few pleasures you had at that time. I’ve heard from more than a few immigrants about funeral customs. You all bring each other food. It’s something of a universal. We used to do that in Thirteen, when I was a boy, before the regulations tightened so much. Food can be a comfort in a time of grief. But you obviously associate food with the Capitol, with indulgence, and with the Games you survived in order to have a victor’s perks, so you feel guilty about it.”

Dammit. The man skewered him neatly with that and it seemed like he was barely even trying. Aurelius must have read something into his silence, because the next question came quickly enough. “How do you rate your emotions? Do you feel more settled, more in control?”

He shrugged at that. “I’m not going to murder people in the hallway,” he shot back, well aware there was a nasty edge to his voice as he said it. 

A pencil tap on the notepad, but Haymitch didn’t look up, staring instead at the blank metal wall. “You’re in the early stages of recovery from alcoholism and depression, both chronic. Both of those act as pretty significant emotional dampers. Regular emotional coping mechanisms had atrophied a bit, so every emotion is likely to overwhelm you. And you’re dealing with some pretty difficult issues right now. The war, the loss of Kat—”

Haymitch neatly cut him off right there before he could say the girl’s name and force thoughts of her on him. He wasn’t going to talk about her. “I’m not going to murder people in the hallway,” he insisted again, but his voice was more tired now. He was tired, to be honest. Tired of not sleeping well, tired of feeling like a damn teenager again with the whiplash of emotions. “You know, I like it best when I don’t dream at all.”

“I could believe that,” Aurelius said, scribbling on his notepad. “I’ll call down to the infirmary. Let’s re-up your sleep medication for another two weeks, and then see how you do on a reduced dosage. Obviously you weren’t ready for weaning off the medication yet.”

Wonderful—the continued trip to the infirmary to get his knockout pills right before bed because like a five-year-old, he couldn’t be trusted to keep them in his room. Keep that up right alongside the lingering vitamin shots and anti-inflammation doses for his liver, though at least he was off the anti-emetics now. Only the fact that nobody got to self-medicate made him feel better. It wasn’t personal, simply Thirteen being a bunch of control freaks. But he had the feeling they watched him closely every day when he worked the infirmary, and they double-checked his inventory sheets, as if he’d start just popping pills or guzzling rubbing alcohol like some kind of crazy. 

At least he’d gotten off the shots they had him on right after the booze got cut off for good. No more thiamine, no more anti-emetics. They’d kept him on something to try to convince his liver to calm the fuck down and repair itself, so that was another shot daily. Every minute of his day mapped out on purple ink on his forearm. It drove him crazier than he already was. His increased awareness of things without the haze of white liquor, and the restlessness of a body now having ample energy to burn, didn’t help that frustration. Only two things did, and so he looked forward to afternoon training, and the freedom of that daily walk up in the woods, like it was his salvation.

The woods meant a few hours of freedom and fresh air, and particularly with Johanna there, he could lose himself in a sense of peace. They hadn’t managed to shoot anything yet, but it seemed like both of them silently agreed that didn’t much matter. If Coin started bitching that their hunting time was wasted, they’d have to focus more on it. But training felt good in another way, because it afforded him the opportunity to lose himself in the demands of his body—the push to do it just a bit better, to keep going, to improve. 

He had the feeling Alma Coin might happily take the chance to deny him the chance to get out there—Tilly had said it, and he trusted her One perceptions that Coin had noted him as a threat, could see all the little ways she tried to leash him already and remind him exactly who was in charge. He was forty-one, out of shape, a recovering alcoholic with a fucked-up mind. She had plenty of ammunition to use against him. 

Overplayed his hand early with her, dammit, but given that he’d been in withdrawal and emotionally overwhelmed about Katniss and struggling mightily to make their backup plan come together and sell it, maybe he could be excused for not exactly being at his most subtle. So, he pushed himself all the harder to succeed in the training, and when the burn was in his lungs and his muscles and he fought through that, there was the additional bonus that it was hard for him to focus only on how dark and messed-up his mind really was and all the things that, _thank you very fucking much_ District Thirteen, he couldn’t treat with liberal doses of white lightning.

Today they trained with a partner, giving and blocking strikes with a training staff, the ends carefully padded with foam in case someone got overzealous. Their trainer, a hard-bitten woman of about fifty named Shagreen, with a face dark and tough as an old leather boot—no first name given to them, of course—looked at the group of victors and grumbled that at least they weren’t as difficult to deal with as the teenagers, so he suspected that was the cause of the foam.

When he turned after finishing the round of exercises and saw the man standing beside Shagreen, watching the victors training with obvious interest, he honestly though he saw a ghost, and that his mind had finally gone and done it and totally cracked on him. But almost immediately the rational part of him looked, saw the hair receded and what bit there was had gone pure white rather than a grey-grizzled dark brown, saw the looseness of age in that olive skin. He realized that the man was twenty years older than when Haymitch had seen him last, and thus he was very obviously real. 

But that brown-eyed gaze looked at him with that same curious interest he’d always had back when he was District Twelve’s Head Peacekeeper. He’d always weirded Haymitch out, to be honest, with the way he’d try to be nice on the sly, simply because Haymitch’s ma was unfortunately poor enough to have to fuck him to put food on the table, and because Ash was unfortunate enough to have been fathered by him, and Phineas Fog knew it. No hard math for the man when Magnolia Abernathy came up pregnant close to two years after her husband died. No hard math for anyone in the Seam either, and the epithet of “Peacekeeper brat” had dogged Ash now and again pretty much until the day he died. 

He’d hated Fog back then for that bland, almost avuncular condescension. As if Fog trying to give Haymitch a piece of candy every now and again made up for what he did to his ma, what she submitted to out of necessity, made up for that damn white uniform. 

The rage was utterly real now, and all the hotter for indulging in the remembrance of all the reasons he hated this man, and the perspective he’d gained since he was a child. He’d been whored out himself, felt the shame and bitter hopelessness and sometimes he’d cried alone in his kitchen like his ma had on nights she thought he wasn’t awake to hear. If Haymitch had screwed up and caused her death, this man was the one who’d carried out the dirty work. Snow wouldn’t have trusted anyone less than the Head Peacekeeper with the orders. The woman he regularly fucked, and his own son, and Fog had coolly sacrificed them, as well as Briar. It felt strangely satisfying that here was someone _worse_ than him when it came to the deaths—the murders—that had so shattered his life. Plus in the two years after his family died, before Fog retired, the man had viciously cracked down on Twelve and enforced the laws in a way he hadn’t throughout Haymitch’s life—Snow must have blamed him for what had happened, and the asshole guiltily turned that around on the district. People had died during that period of terror. He’d never forget Lorna Hawthorne and her blackened face, the grotesque way her eyes bugged out and her tongued protruded. She’d been fifteen and died hard at the end of a rope because she was little. All of that responsibility that had weighed on him for so long, terrified and guilty, he now gladly laid at Fog’s door. If he was guilty, this man was even more to blame, and the anger swiftly stoked up further by it. It felt like swallowing fire that burned through every inch of him, demanding release, and Aurelius’ visualization exercises and advice on dealing with the flare-ups of anger were utterly forgotten.

He nodded over to Johanna. “So, can I step out for a second?”

She smirked at him, breathing hard but still lightly balancing on the balls of her feet, her training staff held at the ready, mocking him gently in a way that told him she was well aware it would keep him going. “You all worn out already?”

“No,” he replied, gesturing towards their new guest, making sure from the way he had his body angled, it wouldn’t be seen by Shagreen or Fog himself, “I just need to go kill our new friend…though I might take a water break on the way back if you don’t mind.”

“By the looks of him it shouldn’t take you long, but… you want some backup?” she quipped, but her eyes were steady on his. Even through the anger he had to smile a bit—she didn’t demand or question anything, simply offered him her support. He nodded at that, relieved. He could use that. The rational part of his consciousness fighting with the rage also admitted that more than help kicking some ass, he needed someone who’d be willing to step in and call him off, and someone who didn’t have a personal stake and could look at this with clearer eyes than him.

He headed over and Shagreen said, “Apparently this is the new—“

“I know exactly who he is,” he said, eyeing Fog now that they were up close. He couldn’t resist a small feeling of malicious pleasure that with the slight stoop of age, now he stood just a bit taller than Fog did. “So you’d better have good reason to be here,” and mentally he added, _miserable piece of shit_. Blame all the years of biting his tongue, but he wasn’t as much of a firecracker as Johanna at simply dealing out insults as a provocation. For now, his will won over his anger, but one wrong move, one wrong word, and it would be a damn near thing.

From the expression on Fog’s face, how carefully he regarded Haymitch, he realized that full well. But there was no fear there. No apology either—bastard. “I’ve come to serve as your liaison for the Peacekeeper intelligence network.”

A spy? That was news, and it caught him off guard. But it had to be true. Thirteen wouldn’t have let him in unless he served some useful function to the rebellion. Though the suspicious part of his mind wondered if they’d let a snake in among them. The man might be a double agent, after all. He’d done exactly what Snow demanded like a good little pet. “Well,” Johanna said, casually patting Haymitch’s shoulder and smirking at Fog, “my friend Haymitch here apparently wants to kick your ass, pal. And he’s not all rainbows and cuddles, true, but he’s not exactly prone to going berserk at the sight of someone. So that means you’ve done _something_ to piss him off.” I figure if you can’t play well together, we might have to send you back for another model.” He wanted to smile at the veiled threat in it and how clearly she stood with him, but he kept his expression neutral, eyeing Fog and trying to read him.

Not a flinch. Either he was brave or stupid or both. Fog gave a snort of what sounded like indulgent amusement. “All right, I came down here since apparently this was the only way I could have a word in private with you both before President Coin wants to chain me to a desk and put me to work.” A pause, and he repeated to Shagreen with a clear emphasis, “ _In private_ , please.”

“Privacy is a concept they have a few little issues with here, Fog,” Haymitch said dryly, not above enjoying the subtle defiance of addressing him so dismissively.

Shagreen looked at all of them, obviously deciding that Haymitch and Johanna weren’t going to gang up on one old man and beat the shit out of him. “I leave you three alone, I don’t want to clean up blood later.” She shook her head, muttering to herself as she went to go watch Cashmere and Annie, the muffled _thwap_ of the padded staff ends coming faster and faster. 

With that done and Shagreen , he made the gesture as exquisitely sarcastic as he could—hands palm and spread from his waist, eyebrows exaggeratedly raised. _Well?_ “Well,” Fog echoed it, “to summarize—get to the point you’re interested in—“ fuck, the man was actually nervous now, “—your mother…”

“My ma, my brother, _and_ my girlfriend,” he interrupted Fog coolly, “though I’d say you did Ma the most wrong, of course. Or are you going to apologize for treating her so cheap from start to finish, just another whore you could fuck and then kill without any troubles?”

Fog pinched the bridge of his nose with obvious irritation, sending the gold wire-framed glasses perched there a little askew. “Can you please shut up for a few seconds? You managed to fool all those sponsors and Gamemakers and the damn President, so I know you’ve learned when to listen and not openly show off how much cleverer you think you are.”

“Oh, this is going well,” Johanna said sarcastically Fog eyed her but didn’t have any clever remarks about that. Haymitch bit his tongue only with difficulty, sensing that if nothing else, perhaps he’d get an apology out of it. He wasn’t sure that would be enough for him to work with the man, even for the sake of the rebellion, but regret would be a small start. Obviously Fog struggled with something, and if he’d come with an arrogantly clean conscience, he’d have given Haymitch more of a tongue-lashing than that little verbal slap.

“Right,” Fog said, half to himself. “No good way to say this, so here you have it. I got your mother and your girlfriend out alive all those years ago, and I’d have done the same for your brother except Snow already got his damn claws into him when I tried to get him to call off the whole execution order, decided to keep him alive as leverage against you. Ash, he’s still alive, or at least he was as of the last report I got before leaving Two, but he’s—well, they used tracker jacker venom on him to—anyway, that was sort of the start of the resistance. It’s grown since then. Did the same for your family when you pissed Snow off,” he nodded to Johanna. “So your mother, father, and older brother, they’re all fine. Your brother’s in District Eight right now, acting as one of our agents. Although Snow did the same as with Ash, claimed your little sister.” He paused for a split second as and then raised his left hand slightly, enough that Haymitch saw the plain gold ring on his finger, eyeing Haymitch defiantly. “Also, I love her, and even back then, she loved me. You saw what she thought was safe for you to see.”

Somehow he found his tongue again through the haze of sudden confusion. “I think,” he said, fighting to gather his wits. The bottom had just dropped out, both personally and in terms of the Peacekeepers and their ability to affect this thing. Nothing made sense all of a sudden. He’d had all the feeling so abruptly stunned out of him by the magnitude of how his world had just tilted on its axis that it was like the best liquor haze he’d ever had—so calm he was virtually numb. “I think we’re gonna tell President Coin that we need to talk a bit more tonight up on the surface before we get down to business. Because, old man, you’ve got a hell of a lot of explaining to do.”


	21. Chapter 21

Johanna’s head spun dizzily after that little pronouncement from the man—Fog, Haymitch had called him, and obviously he was from District Two, helping run the Peacekeeper intelligence network as he did. She’d wanted to barge into the middle of things and demand to know what the fuck was going on, but watching the tight-strung tension between the two men, she’d held back, sensing that there was something that needed to play out.

And how, apparently; all something about Fog and Haymitch’s mom, and then suddenly Fog turning the tables and announcing that they were alive and well, and then extending that to Johanna in the blink of an eye. If he was lying, she’d rip his eyes out. Rip his eyes out and rip his balls off, for that matter. She didn’t care that he looked like he was seventy-something and even if he was a spry, strong old fart for his age and a man she was still only about a third of his years and thus it would be no contest for her to take him apart so it was hardly fair. It wouldn’t be fair for him to dangle hope in front of her like that, let it blaze like a light in the darkness, only to yank it away and prove it was the flicker of fireflies all along. 

Alive, rescued by whatever secret Peacekeeper cabal they apparently had going. They’d been alive and well the last eight years and suddenly she wanted to scream because of the sheer pressure of that idea pressing in on her mind. All the blame for her inability to cope getting them killed, all the loneliness, all the wistful and then eventually bitter thoughts about what Bern would do, or Heike, or how she missed her mom and dad, were too much. Eight years and they’d been alive and she’d never known.

Thankfully, Fog retreated, apparently to get Shagreen or someone to contact Coin and tell them that no, they couldn’t come play in Command and strategize until they got all this shit worked out and decided they weren’t going to straight up murder Fog. “Who is he?” she demanded, turning on Haymitch, seeing how pensive and unsettled he looked. His eyebrows rose and she realized her teeth were gritted and her fists clenched, probably looking like she wanted someone to hit. But the force of keeping it bottled up felt almost like anger. Hope was an agony that she couldn’t bear.

Haymitch sighed, arms crossed over his chest, eyes drifting down somewhere around the region of her knees. “Phineas Fog. Head Peacekeeper in Twelve until I was eighteen. I…” He exhaled sharply. “He had a long-running thing with my ma. Apparently a requited thing, if they’re married now. I always thought it was necessity that made her go to him. We were so damn poor and always needed the money, and— _fucking hell_ ,” something contorted his features, a mix of pain and anger and confusion, “she lied to me about that? Why would she lie to me?”

He sounded so bewildered and even hurt that it cut through the knot of her answering confusion and grief and anger. Yeah, it was easier to think about his problems here, to try to be cool and logical about it, and push back the monster in her head that threatened her with the darkness. Forcefully, she shoved at it. “You were a kid,” she said, trying to not think about him, not about _Haymitch_ , but about the situation like it was someone she didn’t even know, someone from Seven maybe who she’d met at school but who didn’t matter to her. Imagining him as a teenager in the Games was bad enough. Imagining him as a little boy in Twelve, still innocent, hurt even more. “Just a little kid for most of it, by the sound. He was your Head Peacekeeper. Even if he wasn’t a raging asshole, still—white uniform, Haymitch.” It was admittedly only in the last few weeks with finding out that the Peacekeeper moles had dug their way into every corner of Panem and been invaluable as fighters and intelligencers that she’d had to rethink her automatic dislike of that white uniform. They might not have been bad Peacekeepers in Seven for the most part, but they still were there on behalf of the Capitol. That was an irreparable black mark. “You think people would have liked the idea of her screwing him unless she had to because she was desperate for the money?” She made an assumption there that it was much like Seven when it came to that.

He winced at that in a way that was familiar, and it was an expression she’d never seen on his face before, one that seemed more like it belonged on a younger man. She couldn’t help a snort of laughter. “What?” he demanded.

“After every fucked up and perverted thing they did to you for almost twenty years, and you’re wincing like a prude at _that_.”

“Pardon me if I’m not into thinking too deeply about my ma’s sex life,” he shot back defensively. “You want to know all the details about your parents?”

“Point taken.” She’d heard the creak of bed-ropes sometimes in her childhood while they were in the winter town, and at summer lumber camp seen her parents coming back from walks in the woods at lunch break or right after work got off looking relaxed in that way that she now recognized as post-sex bliss. Nobody fucked in the canvas tents, really, given that with the flaps closed in summer they were stifling, and with the flaps open there was absolutely no privacy. As a little kid she hadn’t understood. As she got old enough to get it, and to understand the joking comments from people who saw couples coming back from the woods, and she’d winced just like Haymitch winced now. “But hey—better that she chose it than her doing it because she was desperate, right?”

“Yeah, of course, still don’t want to think about it, thanks,” he muttered crossly, fingers raking agitatedly through his hair. “But you’ve got a point. They wouldn’t have taken to her going to him voluntarily. It would be too much.” She understood what he meant. If Magnolia Abernathy could look at that white uniform and see someone worth loving, it was a dangerous thing. Even more dangerous if Snow found out that there was a challenge to the divide between the districts, and a Head Peacekeeper was part of that. “If it was a true thing between them, it would have easier to sell it as him being her customer. Everyone could accept that.” He paused, shaking his head. “Damn.”

“Care to share, genius?”

He kept shaking his head slowly. “All those years hiding it from everyone…even me and Ash. Just thinking…how fucking lonely it must have been. Couldn’t even nod to each other on the street, let alone hold hands or anything. She could only go to him every so often, for a few hours. No wonder it seemed so damn weird when he tried to be nice to Ash and me. He couldn’t do any more than that. Couldn’t give her too many things either or it would draw too much attention.” He looked at her, something frighteningly vulnerable in his grey eyes, and a dawning kind of compassion. “Playing a part that completely is its own kind of hell. Living in fear all the time that someone will figure it out because it’s too dangerous. We both know that.” She couldn’t add anything to that, though her silence seemed to serve as eloquent agreement. Yeah, they’d both lived that life, and she didn’t envy anyone else who did and had nobody to turn to, day by day, who could help them bear it. Didn’t expect to feel sympathy for the old man, or Haymitch’s mom, but she did. Another sigh, hands mussing his hair again so that it looked like a wild mess that hadn’t seen a comb in several days. “He’s Ash’s father too. Dammit.”

She hesitated—odd for her, she was well aware, but the last weeks had taught her at least a little discretion. Or at least, where it came to the few people she actually gave a damn about in life, she’d started to learn that brash words that might wound wasn’t who she wanted to be now. She didn’t want to be the bitch that used people because she could and because it made her feel less powerless, the one who dismissed them as weak if they couldn’t handle her because her harsh anger made her feel less afraid, less vulnerable. She didn’t want to hurt him. But all the same, truth withheld could wound as well. So she decided she owed him honesty now rather than a sense of betrayal later when he found out that she’d suspected. “I think he’s your dad as well, to be honest.”

He turned on his heel with a lightning-quick movement, hands raised as if to attack, or to defend against something unbearable. “What?” he demanded, eyes suddenly narrowing to little more than slits.

It was that smile—the wry smirk that Fog gave after his snarky remark about Coin chaining him to a desk. Just a momentary expression, but she’d seen it, and it startled her. She’d seen that amused smile before on Haymitch’s lips many a time, first as a child watching it on television, then on the actual man himself. After she saw it she’d second-guessed herself, questioned it, started to wonder if she was imagining shit. But while Haymitch and Fog bickered, she’d carefully looked at the two of them.

It was subtle—the height, the broad-shouldered, broad-chested build. Haymitch had Twelve eyes for certain, light grey and large, while Fog’s were golden brown and wide-set in a familiar way. Some echoes in the jawline, the cheekbones too, though it looked like Haymitch inherited most of his features from his mother, and that curly black hair to boot. “It’s nothing so obvious that anyone would see unless they were deliberately looking for it,” she told him, which made Haymitch perceptibly relax. “And when you were a kid, or even a teenager, it would have been even tougher to spot. But…”

“But you think so,” Haymitch concluded. “And you saw it even before you knew about Ash being his son, so…”

“I’m pretty sure he’s got Seven blood in him too, for what it’s worth. Lumberjack and carpenter both—most of it’s lumberjack, but the skin’s darker.” They had the same olive skin, true, but that dark brown hair on Fog, the brown eyes—he looked to her like he was mostly lumberjack, brown-haired with lighter brown eyes, but the golden skin was darkened to olive by some blood from Seven’s carpenter class with their deep, raw umber skin. “He looks like some of the oldest old farts back home, born back before the Dark Days. Back when they would have mingled a little more.”

“I don’t think we have anyone left in Twelve that old,” he said dryly. “But I remember some of ‘em when I was a kid. I know what you mean. There were more miner-merchie mixes back then. Wasn’t a big thing, unlike when Perulla Banner ran off with Burt Everdeen, twenty years back.” She saw falling in his expression with a sudden mournful look. _Katniss._ Of course.

He shook his head, the agitation draining from him. “It ain’t easy, but at least it’s good news for you and me. Peeta, he’s still screwed,” he said quietly. “Dead girl, dead family, and the other leg…”

“I know,” she said, hating in that moment how the crushing weight of guilt, grief, or both had seemed to draw all the life and animation out of him again. But she had to admit that confused as she was about all of it, Peeta certainly got the raw deal. They’d amputated his other leg yesterday and kept him well-doped up. Every time she’d passed by his bed in the infirmary, he’d been sleeping, or knocked out. Quite possibly that was for the best. Those would be the last peaceful moments he had before he woke up to a reality made one step harder now, while he struggled still with the overwhelming mountain of everything that had happened to him in the last weeks.

It was harsh perspective, but it seemed to calm Haymitch down. Besides, if he could focus on the problem of the living rather than keep company with the dead as she suspected he had for so many years, she figured that could only help him. “He talks like he knows my parents,” she said.

“Maybe he does.” Haymitch sucked in a shaky breath. “If I find he’s somehow faked all this to get me to cooperate…”

Cynical thought, but she couldn’t blame him. They’d all been used and abused enough, seen enough of the nasty side of human nature too, that trying to believe something was pure and selfless seemed virtually impossible. “Let’s see what he has to say.” She put a hand on his shoulder for a moment. “If he’s lying, I’ll help you hide the body.”

He smiled at that and there was something genuine and relieved in the expression. Apparently their new buddy could pull a little clout with President Coin, because they ended up with surface liberty a full hour earlier than usual. “I want your issues resolved today,” Coin said with that drearily emotion-free expression of hers. “All three of you are currently necessary, and your personal problems can’t be a distraction from the war operations.”

She hoped Haymitch had caught it, and he obviously had, because a few minutes later as a guards opened the hatch and she drank in the smell of the outdoors, she muttered to him, “We’re a _current_ necessity?”

“Let’s hope we don’t find out what happens when we’re not needed,” he said back quietly, following Phineas Fog out into the sunlight. For an old man, he moved quickly enough.

Normally she and Haymitch would wander out into the woods, but today they paused at the shattered, blasted ruins of Thirteen’s former above-surface existence. Fog perched on the blackened remains of a marble pillar that had likely once been part of the Justice Building. He reached inside his jacket. “Here. Got something for both of you, from your families.” He pulled out a bulging pouch made of some shimmering, iridescent material that looked like the ever-changing rainbow sheen of oil on water. He fumbled with the clasp.

“You want me to get that?” she said impatiently, hoping like hell it wasn’t actually a weapon of some kind.

He grunted impatiently. “It’s the fucking arthritis, girl, not my wits.” She glanced over at Haymitch and raised an eyebrow. _Yep. Your dad._ “And no, you want me to disarm this—have to press it a certain way. If you do it wrong, or just yank the thing open, it sets off an acid packet and presto, all you’ve got is a pouch full of acid and dissolved paper.” He gave a slight dip and shrug of his shoulders even as he worked, peering intently at the clasp. “They’ll know you were carrying something covert, but they’ll never know what.”

Finally he got it open and neatly unfolded it, muttering to himself as he pulled out three envelopes. “One for you, Miss Mason,” he said, and there was strangely nothing mocking in the courtesy. She stepped forward and plucked the envelope from his fingers. “I didn’t have time to get anything from your brother Bern, and, well…Heike…you read that first and we’ll get to her. Good news first, less good news later. Still not bad, but…” Then he seemed to realize he was rambling. She raised her eyes from the white envelope and the loopy scrawl of “Johanna” on the back of it. Gunnar Mason’s handwriting—she was certain of it. If he faked it, he’d put a hell of a lot of thought into the details. Then again, a man with a document-eating pouch intended for spies probably was into the little details.

“Two for you, Mister Abernathy,” he said politely to Haymitch. Probably trying to not be overly familiar rather than mocking, but she saw Haymitch bristle at it all the same. “Your mother, and Briar Wainwright.”

“Snow calls me ‘Mister Abernathy’,” Haymitch informed him irritably, grabbing the two letters. “And really, I have claim to the name from my ma being married to a man with that name when I was born, but I’m not _really_ an Abernathy, am I?”

Fog fell silent, hands on his knees. “So you finally figured that one out.”

“No, she did,” Haymitch said, gesturing to her. “I…dammit.” He shook his head.

“If you’d rather just have it out,” Fog began.

“You fucking _flogged_ me for poaching when I was twelve, so don’t ask me to call you ‘Daddy’,” Haymitch snapped angrily.

“You were being a damn reckless child waltzing out of the woods in front of five Peacekeepers with a pair of ducks in hand simply because you resented me because of me and your mother, and I think you wanted me to give you even more reason to hate me. Don’t think I enjoyed ordering that flogging. And don’t be a hypocrite, boy. I didn’t see you escaping into the woods with your tributes to save their lives rather than going on the train to hand them over to certain doom year after year,” Fog shot back crisply. “You did what you had to do because it was a small sacrifice that kept a bigger evil at bay. I know you’re smart enough to understand that idea, so—“

Haymitch held up a hand, obviously realizing the outburst got him nowhere. Johanna tried to not go wide-eyed, because shit, usually she was the one mouthing off and Haymitch was the one grousing about it. It seemed like everything flipped upside down today, and anything powerful enough to affect Haymitch this much bothered her. Maybe it was the part of her that she’d guiltily acknowledged that had always counted on his as a constant. “If you want this to be an actual adult conversation rather than us just screaming at each other and giving Johanna here a show, just shut up and let me read for a little while,” Haymitch said.

Johanna sat down cross-legged in the grass and tore the envelope open, fingernails making it a ragged job. She pulled out several sheets of paper and two photographs. She looked at that first. The faces she’d seen for the last eight years only in the photographs around the house, so few because poor lumber families didn’t have cameras, and seen so seldom because every glance at the pictures reminded her exactly of why they were now gone. They were a little older now, her mom and dad, close to sixty, and he was totally grey now and balding and age etched deeper lines in their faces, but they smiled. Gunnar’s arm around Petra’s shoulders, they stood on an overlook somewhere with a breathtaking mountain vista in the background, mountains that were so much bigger than the ones near Lake Sawyer that were barely more than glorified hills. District Two—it had to be. 

The cynical part of her mind told her that they could probably have faked that in Three easily enough. Wiress or Beetee could probably explain exactly how and use huge words she didn’t get. But staring at that picture, at the faces of her parents, she wanted to believe.

She didn’t know exactly where the next picture came from. But it was Bern all the same, the last roundness of boyhood vanished from his face, features sharpened fully into manhood. Standing in front of a building somewhere, he wore a white Peacekeeper uniform, his uniform cap in his hand, his dark brown hair clipped short neatly. She’d never seen Bern without his hair a mess. The smile was more tightly controlled than his old gleeful, joking expression, but it was him all the same.

Her fingers clenched, her breath coming harshly, and she forced herself to ease up before she wrinkled the pictures. Tucking them behind the paper of the letter, she unfolded it.

 _Hanna_. A Peacekeeper wouldn’t have easily known that salutation, would he? Hanna—the name rang with everything she used to be. They all called her “Jo” now, or “Johanna”, or “that bitch”. 

_Hanna,  
No doubt Phin explained that he got us out alive and that we’re here in District Two. Your mom and I are all right. There’s work to be done that needs us and it would raise too many suspicions for us to disappear right now along with him. Forgive us for not coming to you right away now. But give us half a chance and I promise we’ll rip the head off that lying sack of shit sitting in the Capitol…_

She laughed at that, trying not to give way to tears, almost hearing her father growling the words in her head. She wasn’t his little girl any longer, there for him to protect and save. She’d had to learn to survive on her own. But it was so comfortably familiar to read that. They knew, they’d watched that propo that flayed her wide open, and they weren’t disgusted by her. They were angry on her behalf. More than anyone else in the country, that mattered to her. 

She smelled a spicy, fruity scent in the air, vaguely reminiscent of burning fruit-wood, and looked up to see Fog with a pipe in his mouth, casually looking away from her and Haymitch while they read. Oddly kind of him—given he was some kind of spymaster, she’d have expected him to watch them like a hawk.

“Best smoke that while you can,” Haymitch told him, obviously smelling it as a well, but not looking up for his letters, “because I’m sure tobacco’s on the ‘banned substances’ list.”

“Along with coffee, alcohol…”

“General free will,” Haymitch added dryly. 

Fog chuckled in acknowledgment of that, leaning back against the pillar and continuing his smoke.

She read the rest of the letter, fingers trembling by the time she read the last words. _Love, Dad and Mom._

Love—something so easily offered, but she didn’t realize how bereft she’d been of it until now. They’d seen the worst of her, every terrible thing she’d done and become, and yet they still wrote to her so affectionately. Was that because they couldn’t face it had happened, as they’d awkwardly tried in the year after her Games? No, if they’d managed to live a smooth, seamless cover story for the last eight years, surely they had to get the idea that a life could be forever changed without going back. They’d been jolted out of their simple life as lumberjacks and thrown into a whole new world with lies and spies and who the hell knew what else. Her mom and dad were spies, for fuck’s sake. Shades of grey must be nothing new to them.

She wasn’t alone, not anymore. She folded the paper again carefully and tucked it in her pocket, along with the photographs. She had few possessions here in Thirteen, but these would be treasures to her, until she saw them again.

~~~~~~~~~~

Best to rip the bandage off, Haymitch decided, staring at the envelopes in his hands like they were a ticking bomb. It was all so big that trying to grasp small bits of it seemed all he could do for the moment. They were alive—that was the first reality. But all too easy for thoughts of how everything had changed and his ma and Briar had lived to see what he’d become to paralyze him. It had all been so public, and bad enough that the entire country witnessed it, but the bitter shame at the thought of those who had loved him watching his descent made him cringe. Better that…no, what the hell was he thinking? Better that they died in pain and fear on Snow’s whims rather than live? A far, far better thing that they were alive, but maybe it was better that he keep his distance. What could he offer them anyway? Twenty-five years later, they’d lived their lives without him for longer than he’d been a part of it.

The easier one first, he decided—Briar. Maybe not “easier” as such, but less complicated. He tore the envelope open, and looked at the picture of her standing on a porch somewhere—District Two, presumably—with a man of about her age, his arm around her waist, her hand resting on his chest. He glanced at her companion, took in the dark skin and reddish hair and features, but his eyes went to her. He’d loved her more than life itself, once. Briar Wainwright had been one of the few things in the arena that kept him going. She’d deserved far better than what she’d gotten back. Their last meeting, the day before she’d supposedly died, she’d grabbed him from behind in a surprise hug and he’d panicked and thrown her to the ground. It seemed like for the last twenty-five years, most times he imagined Briar, he couldn’t remember the good parts, the giddy joy and laughter of childhood games or later, the taste of her kiss or the look of her skin in sunlight out the forest, her fingers in his hair, the fierce longing to actually make love with her someday when they were both safe. It was always her on the floor, looking up at him with tears in her eyes from that injured wrist and a look of she couldn’t hide. Looking at him like she finally, finally saw the monster he’d become, and she was rightly terrified.

He’d slipped out to the woods with Ash the next day to avoid talking to her before dinner, and he’d never said another word to her because when he came back the house was engulfed in flames. All these years he’d carried the weight inside him that she’d died for his sake, and died afraid of him to boot.

Now he looked at her, a woman past forty, and the casual intimacy with this man he’d never met. Her face was a bittersweet sight to him. Seeing her in middle age, the features fully formed and even weathered a little, was a joy—because in his mind, she’d been forever sixteen. But that heart-shaped face, that slight cleft to her chin, put him in mind of Hazelle. All last winter he’d watched Hazelle as she cleaned his embarrassment of a house and wondered if that was how Briar would look as a grown woman. He had his answer now. The resemblance was there, but it wasn’t uncanny—sisters, rather than doubles. Still, the reversal of it hurt. Now it was Hazelle who was dead, and Briar who lived, and Hazelle’s death was on his head instead.

_Haymitch,  
If I’m being presumptuous here, I’m sorry. I’m not the same as I was when we were kids together either. But I doubt you’ve changed so much that I don’t still know a few things about you._

_I don’t know whether we would have worked it out then. We’ll never know. But what happened that last day was an accident. I didn’t know how to deal. I needed you to be back right away because you being in the arena terrified me so damn much. I couldn’t think right then to what you needed, and how I could be there for you, and how that might need to change. So as my guess is that you and your overdeveloped sense of responsibility have blamed yourself, stop it. That day didn’t kill me._

_Hazelle’s death is on Snow. See some justice for her if you can, but you don’t take blame for it. I’m pretty sure I watched one nephew die that day, and another in the replacement for the Quell. If Haze has any kids left alive, please try to keep them safe. Rube and I will take them. We haven’t had any of our own and I suspect at this point we won’t. And it hurts to write that I don’t even know how many kids my little sister had, but that’s a reality I’ve had to accept. I did what I had to do to survive. So did you. I’m a lot wiser than I was at sixteen, and I suspect you’re a better man than you probably think you are._

_I loved you, Hay. But I’ve had to make a new life since then, and I’ve had to let you go in order to survive and live it. Meant going Peacekeeper for twenty years, but that’s opened my eyes to a lot of things I’d have never seen down in the mines. And it means I meant Rubius. So I’ve finally found a way to be happy, and you need to do the same with me. What we had together was good and it helped me through some bad days myself. You’ve had a tough life in ways I can’t even imagine. Don’t make it tougher for my sake. I don’t want your guilt, and I never did. I used to live for the times you’d just let go and be happy. I hope someday we meet again and maybe I’ll see you smile, my friend._

_Apollonia Rackham_

The signature said plenty. Briar Wainwright was her past. He didn’t have the same power over her life that she’d had over his. She’d embraced this new life, and the man beside her in that picture as a part of it. Not forgotten it—she wouldn’t be so eager to take Posy and Vick in if that was the case. But she’d put it in its place and moved on.

Well, she’d always been the sort to verbally smack some sense into him. The absolution in particular was hard to bear. He’d carried the weight for so damn long he couldn’t simply put it down like a bag of groceries. It felt more like picking the first bits of a huge and ugly scab loose to let the infection out, knowing it would bleed anew and leave a scar, but compelled to let it finally heal.

He glanced again at the picture of Briar—Apollonia—and her husband. The sight of her now didn’t spark a wave of love and longing. The boy he’d been, who’d loved that girl, was long gone now, and so was that girl. She was happy. He hadn’t managed to ruin her life. Maybe that was enough.

As he folded her letter, he glanced surreptitiously over at Johanna. Briar’s letter stung in its way, but the look on Johanna’s face hurt too, unguarded as it was. She looked like a woman seeing the sun rise again after years in darkness, a naked hope and relief that made her suddenly look painfully young, almost as if some of the years between the teenager she’d been and the woman past twenty-five were now erased. Good. That letter gave her something that nobody else could have in all the years he’d known her.

He opened his ma’s letter next. He looked at the picture first, steadying himself. She’d aged with grace, and the sight of her, grey haired, sparked a quiet kind of joy in him. She was happy as well as she stood there with a readily recognizable Fog, and a scruffy looking little dog of uncertain ancestry. If this was a fake from Three, it was a painful one. He’d never seen her like this. The tension of living, of raising two boys, and apparently of the lies she’d needed to maintain, meant there was always a strain on her. The smiles had never been entirely relaxed. But this Magnolia Abernathy—Fog?—smiled like Johanna had, as if something unbearable had been lifted from her.

That picture did more than Fog’s assurance and the wedding ring to tell him that it was true. She’d loved Fog even then, and loved him still. His world crumbled underneath his feet, remade anew in ways strange and unnerving. 

Her letter was short.

_I tried to write this letter eight times already. There’s a lot to say and a lot you’re owed truth on, but you deserve it from me, not on paper or over the telephone._

_You’ve made so many hard choices and faced them alone, and suffered so much. I had to leave when you needed people by you the most. I know what it’s like enduring keeping secrets with nobody you can trust. I wish I could be there for you now, especially now that the truth can be told for both of us. Forgive me if you can._

_You’re brave and clever and you’ll do anything to protect the people you love, and I suspect you care a little too much like you always did. A mother couldn’t ask for finer than that. I love you, son. Always will._

Shit. Forty-one years old and he felt like he was on the verge of bawling like a damn kindergartner. So maybe a person never got too old to feel relief at hearing their parents didn’t regard them as a complete fuck-up. 

He tried to reconcile it all in his mind, this whole life lived behind a curtain drawn between the sixteen-year-old child who’d grieved his dead and the reality of them whisked away, hidden, alive but forever altered onto a new path.

He’d lied in his life. Lied to sponsors to try to save tributes, lied to people in Twelve to keep the truth from putting them at risk, lied with body and words and everything when he was forced into bed with a Capitolite and had to play the role they wanted. He’d learned through harsh demonstration and the terror of threats that lies and secrets made the world keep turning, and the lucky ones never knew about that shadow-world hidden from them. But now Phineas Fog ripped the veil off, and some part of him couldn’t help but feel like that boy again, alone and bewildered, and perhaps even a little betrayed that he’d been kept in the dark for so long, and paid the price for believing the worst. It was hard to not feel a little bit manipulated, to be honest, even alongside the deep swell of relief and gratitude.

He shook his head and laughed softly to himself. The manipulator got manipulated. It seemed only fitting, didn’t it? His ma and Fog—his ma and his pa—had played him to keep him safe when he was a boy, and he’d turned around and concealed things from Katniss and Peeta, desperately hoping to do the same. 

He’d told himself all that, hadn’t he? Pacing back and forth in his parlor after dark, every light blazing, trying to frantically wear himself out because now he didn’t have the liquor to do the job, and even his training-wearied body wasn’t exhausted enough yet.

_Better that they don’t know. Safer. They’re so young still. Even the boy has to think ahead a bit on his guile. He can’t react immediately and be believed. And if I tell him and not her, it’ll cause trouble. And I can’t tell her. She can act in the moment, but not the long game. Not something this monumental. Look how bad they both did on the Victory Tour by the end. It’s too much and there’s too much on them already. Besides, this way the burden isn’t on them. And if they’re caught, it can’t be used against them if they know nothing. It’s the best way to protect them, isn’t it? The reality’s hard enough, and it could get worse. No point tormenting them with things they might not have if it all goes wrong._

Perhaps there was nothing to forgive or explain with Briar and his ma, given their absolution, and he’d have to do his best to shed the burden of it with as deeply as it had gotten ingrained. But Katniss and the ways he might have failed her remained a dark stain forever beyond his reach now. He could fight a war for her and forty-six other children so that none of them would have to endure the Games again, but he could never ask her for her forgiveness now. He’d done his best for her. He would only hope that somehow, it would be enough.

But he still had a chance with Peeta, and the sharp reminder of the boy he’d been, alone and grieving, urged him to make things right there. Hard as it was to face Peeta, like looking into a mirror of his youthful self, albeit one with blond hair and blue eyes, Haymitch wasn’t forced into hiding and then writing letters to explain it twenty-five years later. Only his own cowardice would keep him from making what amends he could and giving what support he might. _He needs me._ Perhaps he wasn’t the boy’s father, but Fog hadn’t been able to be there either, and yet he’d done the best he could. He’d kept Haymitch’s family alive, saved Johanna’s, done who the hell knew what else to fight Snow on his own terms. 

He’d grown up with the notion of being fathered by a man who’d been violent and a drunk, all the worst facets of Haymitch himself. Dying was honestly the best thing Blair Abernathy could have done. Even then if he’d known Fog was his father, it would have been yet another illusion, one spun of the necessity to hide a dangerous truth, and the preconceptions about that white uniform.

They’d been right to keep it from him. After all, Fog would have gone back to Two only a few years later anyway, and Magnolia would never see him again. What happiness they’d had was stolen shreds at best, and they’d paid for it day by day. Better they had at least that than nothing but misery and fear.

The last remnants of the teenager he’d been howled at it and protested, confused and angry and hurt---didn’t help that his emotions were so damn screwy still. But the man he was, forced to see the world as the grey and confusing place it was rather than stark black and white, a world where sometimes a little pain spared a larger agony, could see beyond himself.

As his ma said, he’d learned to make the hard choices. He’d have to make more of them in days to come. So he could respect that others might have to do the same.

Johanna looked at the two of them, seeming to recognize that they might need a little while here. “So I’m gonna take a walk. Think about some things. When I come back, I want to hear about Heike. Try to not kill each other.” She nodded to Fog. “You know my mom and dad, so we’re gonna talk later.”

After she left, he noticed Fog eyeing her with an expression of amusement and thoughtfulness. “Our Johanna,” he said dryly. “You’d better talk to her before she comes and finds you.” 

“I imagine. Though I think you’re owed it first.”

He eyed the pipe in Fog’s hand, smelling that familiar tobacco. She’d come home some nights with the faint scent of it still on her clothes. She’d lingered close to him for a while for that to happen. He’d been too young then to understand that a brief, mercenary sexual transaction wouldn’t do that. The man who’d been forced to tarry in various homes and beds for hours, who’d furiously scrubbed the perfumes and tobacco and aftershave of Capitolites off him along with sweat and musk, understood far better. 

“Got some of that to spare?” What the hell—Thirteen took his main vices away so there was no booze and no indulgent food for him to have, and it was a big enough day that his nerves were shot. So he might as well indulge a little here. One wasn’t going to kill him, right?

Fortunately, Fog had some cigarette papers as well. “I don’t do as well now with the hands,” he groused.

He rolled the paper around the tobacco, saying calmly, “So, obviously there’s a lot going on back at the last Quell, but let’s start at the beginning. You and my ma.” Years ago, he hadn’t been ready to hear this, but now he was ready to hear it.

So he listened, to all the years in Twelve. He didn’t want to, but he could relate to Fog’s loneliness—a middle-aged man who’d been denied the chance to have a normal life. Unable to form any meaningful relationship with another Peacekeeper because he was their commanding officer, that left only the locals. 

He’d debated hiring a woman once or twice himself over the last few years when he was so fucking lonely he could barely stand it, the years when he was so far gone that even the roughest, most perverted Capitolites wouldn’t pay for him anymore. Not for sex. He was far gone enough to not care at all about that. But he would have paid them to touch him, to hold him, even if only for a little while. Maybe even eat dinner with him. There were women desperate enough they’d do it, and they’d probably even keep their mouths shut and not spread even more stories about how pathetic Haymitch Abernathy had become.

But he’d touched enough men and women and hid his disgust towards them that he wouldn’t ask anyone to come to him out of sheer desperation for survival. Maybe he should have. He would never have forced anyone. It was a hard choice, but it wasn’t the same as being raped, was it? He would have told her she didn’t have to act. Maybe if someone had gotten close enough, they might have found even a little something worthwhile left in him. Maybe he’d have done them both some good, and he could have changed her life for the better with a victor’s wealth. He’d have had to keep it from Snow, of course, for her safety, but he hadn’t done it. Blight’s accusation ate at him again now: too proud, too defensive of his solitude and his fear of needing anyone.

It ate at him still after dinner as he finished evening rounds down in the infirmary. Other nights he and Johanna cooperated on it, helping each other out and making jokes. But Johanna left him alone, caught up in her own thoughts and obviously sensing he needed his space right now. 

He left Peeta until last. Hollow-eyed, exhausted, obviously in deep pain—he changed the sweat-soaked sheets first and gave Peeta some water. 

The head nurse would check his work, but it was sink-or-swim down here in the infirmary and he had to learn fast. They’d had him changing dressings on day two. His hands were already a lot steadier than they’d been—sobriety wasn’t easy, but at least physically it had some benefits. His hands were steadier, his senses sharper. If only he could bear the weight of his own mind, and there was a lot more on it tonight. A night like this, normally he’d have a bottle in hand and not intend to come up anytime soon. But that wasn’t an option. He had to turn to other things. 

He changed the dressings on the leg with care, trying to not wince at the sight of the still-raw stump with its black sutures right next to the healed, toughened stump of Peeta’s other leg—but at least it was healthy pink, no infection or gangrene. “My father used to come bandage me up sometimes,” Peeta said quietly, turning his head to look at Haymitch.

Presumably after Jinny Mellark had once again knocked the shit out of him—Haymitch and guilt were best friends so he well understood the burden of it, but at least his sins had only harmed him in the end. He held his tongue on sharp thoughts about a man who’d stand by and let his wife do that to their son to call himself an actual _father_ , because it was Peeta’s grief here for people he had loved, and Haymitch’s anger paled against the right to that. “Well, doubt I’m as good at it as him, but I’m still learning all this medic stuff, so be patient,” he said lightly.

He should have figured Peeta wasn’t talking in simple terms—the boy always had seen deeper, possessed an insight Katniss never had. “He was my father and he’d come bandage me and give me a pastry and say he was sorry,” Peeta said, his voice barely above a rough whisper. “But he never stopped her…you,” those blue eyes rose to meet Haymitch’s, “would have been easy for you to write me off, I told you to do it and save her. But when you saw you had even a slight chance, you lied and cheated and you fought for me—sponsors, Gamemakers, even the president. And I think—I _know_ —you would have died for me in that arena too if I’d let you.”

“Yeah,” because there was no point lying now—he’d done his best to keep Peeta and Katniss safe from the worst and darkest of it, but Peeta had taken his losses and in shouldering a burden beyond his years, he’d won the right to not be sheltered any longer. All those years ago, the other victors spoke to him, scared and shell-shocked and seventeen, as if he was a man already, being open and honest about things, and he owed Peeta no less than that now.

“He was my father,” Peeta repeated, his voice trembling now, on the verge of breaking, “and he wouldn’t even fight _her_.”

Shame was no stranger to him either, and if he could have Jinny Mellark there, and Liam Mellark, he’d have wanted to thrash both of them for telling this boy, her with her curses and blows and him with his cowardice, that he wasn’t worth anything, not worth loving, not worth defending. A boy who felt so worthless that he’d have thrown his life away for survival of the girl he didn’t even know but idolized as a golden dream, only to feel _useful_.

He’d grown up as a boy without a father, or at least the image of a father who was more monster than man. He’d learned today he had a father who’d flogged him for poaching to keep Snow from noticing things, but who’d then mustered his courage and defied Snow all these years. It wasn’t the easiest legacy, but better to be the son of a man and a woman who both could make tough decisions and live with them, than the son of a man whose solution to everything was whiskey and his fists and a woman who made every move out of seeming self-sacrificing desperation for her children. He’d been a child, and he’d seen things as a child did.

It gave him a small spark of hope for himself, if nothing else. Others had tread that razor’s edge and not been cut to ribbons. To see his mother had a husband who obviously adored her and who’d risked so much to save her, well, that idea satisfied. And Fog was a man Haymitch thought he could work with and accomplish some good. He was too damn old to need a daddy, and he didn’t much need active mothering at this point either. He wasn’t sixteen anymore. He’d have to learn to take Phineas and Magnolia—Nikoleta, apparently—Fog as three adults relating to each other, and remake their relationships anew. They were his mother and father, but he didn’t need their parenting as his younger self had.

But the boy in this bed was seventeen. It wasn’t too late for him. A seventeen-year-old boy, alone and hurt, and already shoved partway down that twisted, dark path of self-loathing. There were hard choices, and then there were sins, and to abandon Peeta to that fate would be firmly the latter. It terrified him to reach out, physically and emotionally, because he hadn’t in so long. What was he thinking anyway, being so presumptuous as to offer himself up as if he was worth it? What use would Peeta have for him? 

Peeta clung to him all the same, fists knotted in Haymitch’s shirt. His grip was strong, but that strong frame was still boyishly soft, still vulnerable with youth. He remembered seventeen, a year of the dark pall of grief, of the beginning of solitude, of shame and secrets and guilt, of what little dignity and pride he had left behind stripped away in any number of Capitol sponsorship gigs and Capitol beds, of what little hope he had left in ashes in all those sex-scented sheets and a frozen arena where his first two tributes died. _Not this one,_ he promised himself silently.

Peeta’s words clung to him too, and their implied agony of disillusionment that a man who wasn’t even his father would do more for him than Liam Mellark had. 

He could help it make sense with a few words, couldn’t he? He reached up and lightly stroked that blond hair—so clumsily at first, as he’d learned to seduce but not to console. But it was a touch meant in reassurance that he saw the pain and he cared, a touch that wouldn’t hurt or shame. He should have done this last year and reached out, no secret that the Mellark family wasn’t exactly happy, no matter what a show they put on for the cameras for the Final Eight and then after the move to Victors’ Village. He’d been convinced the best he could do for the both of them was to stay far away. Perhaps he’d lied even to himself in saying that. 

But staying uninvolved wasn’t an option now. He had to find a way to make this work and be what Peeta needed. _Mentor_ wasn’t enough anymore. “He was your father,” he agreed, gathering Peeta in close. “But you’re mine now, ain’t you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I declined to rehash the whole situation with Phineas Fog, Magnolia Abernathy, and Gunnar and Petra Mason here since the details are over in [It Comes With a Price](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1904550/chapters/4107132).


	22. Chapter 22

Annie heard the groans and complaints of the other victors about things here in Thirteen—everything so regimented, mapped out to perfect specifications.

She held her tongue on her own thoughts. For her, there was something almost calming about routine. No expectations, no decisions to be made, something comfortable and reliable. It was only now that she recognized how much she’d come to rely on Finnick and Mags as the dual pillars supporting her. But with both of them gone, she felt like a rotted-out pier sagging into the water, on the verge of collapse at any given time. They’d taught her how to cope, but at the same time, there had been the expectation that it would be like it always was in Four and they’d be there to support her, as she’d be there for them, and the other victors as well.

Mags was definitely dead, Finnick was almost certainly dead, and the other Four victors were distant and unreachable to her. She’d never been much to the Capitol, so the other districts were all strangers to her. She could look at Haymitch and Johanna, or Blight and Chaff, or Chantilly and Lyme, and see the years of history written in that familiarity and ease. Hell, even Cashmere and Johanna had something of a contempt based on familiarity. Lateen and Carrick and the rest weren’t here. All her supports, gone. She did her best to anchor herself, but it wasn’t the easiest thing. Not to mention any little thing might remind her of him, or of the woman who’d been her mentor and like the grandmother she’d never known, and knock her flat all over again. It wasn’t the first arena that haunted her dreams and her waking hours—it was this new nightmare.

Unlike the others, Aurelius didn’t judge when she admittedly quietly that the routine actually helped her. It gave her that stability she so desperately craved and needed right now. Dinner would always be at the same time, and she didn’t have to decide what to make. True, the food was bland as anything and she craved the flavor of spices and fresh vegetables and the like, but it simply appeared. She had to get up each morning and dress and go to her work in the sewing shop. For her right now, the lack of decisions to be made was a relief. It let her go through her days quietly, without fuss. 

“It’s stability,” Aurelius told her, sitting back in his chair. “And this is very much a period of difficulty for you.”

“My—“ What to call him? Not her husband, and while there was an understanding that they’d likely marry once the Capitol demand died down and a wedding wouldn’t be a threat to his necessary playboy narrative, it wasn’t exactly an engagement, but _boyfriend_ sounded so trite. “Finnick,” she said instead. _My Finnick._ Not what she’d meant to say, even in such halting fashion, but it fit. “Finnick’s dead. Yeah and so, do you think it’s maybe ‘a period of difficulty’?”

 _Bitter doesn’t help you, child,_ she heard Mags’ voice in her mind, clear and true as a ship’s bell. _Never seen bitter fix a single thing after a shipwreck or a hurricane, now. We folks deal with what is, as best we can. Make the best of a bad lot—that’s how we managed to get enough Capitol latitude to train our tributes. So the Games, that’s no different._ “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Aurelius was a good man, and he tried. But he wasn’t one of them, and although Annie admitted he’d have to get it all out of her for Coin to release her to go fight, she wasn’t up to it today. Mags’ voice kept running through her mind in a constant stream, and she shut her eyes before she could imagine her mentor being ripped to pieces again.

She shook her head. “Not today. Thank you.” Right then she almost wanted to go hit something, so training would be welcome. Routine and its safe stability was one thing that helped her right now, but she couldn’t stagnate. Tide might have its cycles, but the ocean was always moving towards something. Training at least gave her some distant point to strive towards, and hopefully achieve.

Lunch was something that had perhaps once been tuna fish. “This may date back to the Dark Days,” she said wryly, prodding at the gelatinous, tasteless white flesh. “I’m not sure how they’d have gotten any supply of marine fish since then.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be chicken, sweetie,” Cashmere said with a trace of an amused smirk, stabbing a stringy green bean with enthusiasm.

“Whatever it is, it could use hot sauce.”

Blight let out a grunt of amusement at that. “You south districts and your damn pepper sauce.”

“What?” Chaff protested, leaning over to lightly elbow Annie. “She’s right—this is a girl with taste.”

Wiress chimed in, “North/south conflicts tend to focus on larger problems of ideology than the use of hot sauce.”

“Plutarch?” Haymitch said dryly, not even looking towards the former Gamemaker, sitting a few seats away with the camera crew and Effie trinket. “You’re the history junkie. Any civil wars fought over cuisine?” He forked up some of the thin, paste-like potatoes. “Aside from the ones over barbecue up in Mentor Central back in the day?” he offered with a knowing smirk. Chuckles answered that from the older crowd—Chaff, Blight, Lyme, Brutus, Clover, and Chantilly. Annie felt some relief that at least Cashmere and Johanna looked about as clueless as she did, and she wasn’t sure about Wiress and Beetee. Deep waters, those two—never easy to tell what they were thinking.

Training in the afternoon again—comfortingly familiar, and cathartic in that she moved towards some goal clearly rather than just circling things over and over. Every blow struck, every mile she ran after her initial days of being horribly winded—obviously she’d let herself go since her Games—brought her closer to being let out there to go fight back against the Capitol. Towards possibly finding Finnick, if he was still out there and alive. Much as Haymitch tried to caution her in that awkwardly well-meaning fashion of his to prepare her for Finnick being dead, she couldn’t give up that final spark of hope. Neither of them had given up on each other in all this time.

Sparring against Lyme took about all her skill and concentration, given the other woman’s strength and savvy. But it was welcome, bringing back old memories of training when she was a teenager. “Gym class”, her ass—but it had saved her life in the arena. Plus she could look at Lyme’s dark eyes and see the fierce determination there as well. She was equally a woman on a mission, and so she was perhaps Annie’s favorite sparring partner, driving her to become better every time they practiced together. Cashmere was still an unknown, working through her own problems, and Brutus solid but awkward. She felt like for now, Lyme was the one she could depend upon where it mattered.

Lost in the moment of the fight, she only heard it once Lyme held up a hand to call a halt and a water break, but then the words crept in like eels working through the water, “… _her_ out into the field? I don’t want Cresta on my squad. She was sniveling and shaking like a leaf on stage during the Reaping, she’ll break down the first time someone points a gun at her.”

She turned to see a lithe, tall woman of about thirty, sitting on one of the benches surrounding the training gym with one of those metal Thirteen water bottles in hand, chatting to another woman who was short and squat as a bollard. She took a casual sip of water and glanced at Annie with a cocked eyebrow. Obviously she’d wanted to be overheard.

She breathed in, did her best to center herself and ignore it, block it from her ears and her mind. But she felt like she’d had one support knocked out from under her anyway and she teetered there crookedly, off-balance. If these were supposed to be her allies and they didn’t give a damn, where did that leave her? She’d have to prove them wrong, and hope that neither of those two were squadmates to her in the end.

Elbows on her knees, purposefully glancing away and striving as best she could for serenity, it took her a moment to be aware of the raised voices, and she looked up to see Johanna there, a good ten inches shorter than her opponent, standing there getting right into the other woman’s space. “And I cried onstage at my first reaping, you frosty bitch. Want to say I didn’t get results? Want to tell me I can’t be relied upon and that I’ll break down when someone points a gun at me? You’ve never even been in battle, have you?” 

It should have been ridiculous, like a tiny dog yapping at a swamp cat, but from the look on the Thirteen woman’s face, she realized she’d stepped into a pile of shit here. Either it was Johanna as a threat or the notion she’d run afoul of the rebellion’s new figurehead, but Annie could see on her face the moment she folded. “My apologies,” she said coolly, capping her water bottle again and nodding towards Johanna.

“Not to me,” Johanna snapped, jabbing a finger towards Annie, “to her.”

“Sorry, Cresta. I hope you prove to be an asset in this war.” Well, nice little passive-aggressive twist there at the end.

Coming over for his own water break after sparring with Blight, Haymitch glanced over at Johanna with a slight smile quirking up one corner of his mouth. “Making friends wherever you go, aren’t you?”

“Oh, shut up,” Johanna grumbled, but the words held no heat of anger, and she nudged Haymitch with her hip lightly as she passed him, to sit on the bench next to Annie.

“Thanks,” Annie said.

“Eh,” Johanna grunted, making a dismissive gesture, and Annie understood that to mean she was uncomfortable with the idea of discussing it. Living with Johanna for a few weeks now had taught her more than a bit about that. Johanna still obviously felt weird about sharing space with someone, and she’d woken up with a startle more than once, probably not used to the slight sounds of someone asleep in the same room as her. 

Annie wouldn’t tell. She also wouldn’t tell about the times Johanna woke from nightmares with a shriek, once with Finnick’s name on her lips, and that awful time she’d heard the sound of muffled tears from the other bed. She’d tried to comfort Johanna that first time she woke up screaming, and Johanna made it obvious that it wasn’t a welcome gesture. The best she could do was pretend that she slept through all of it and had no idea. 

“I got used to not making ripples,” she said quietly, looking down at her hands. “Best thing you can do is stay quiet and out of the way when they don’t want you—“

“You’re lucky they didn’t want you,” Johanna said flatly, and the absence of rage was almost more terrifying, and Annie saw the barely veiled spark of annoyed contempt in her eyes. Annie felt a spark of anger at that point. This was Finnick’s friend here, but she’d kept a frosty distance of her own on anything that didn’t relate to Finnick. Annie honestly wondered if that defense was simply because she was a victor, rather than Johanna actually giving a damn about her as a person. Didn’t that make her on the level with the Capitol on that point, not seeing an individual but instead the blood-soaked title?

She’d made her brief appearance in the Capitol during the 71st Games and then never again once Haymitch, Finnick, and Mags contrived to get her sent home. These last weeks with a bunch of victors who’d all mentored, most of them with each other, was an education. She was tired of it—tired of being seen as the weak one, the crazy one, the one Finnick and Mags protected and swaddled in cotton wool and kept away from a victor’s reality. Tired of the resentment and awkwardness from so many of them, because it seemed like Lyme and maybe Haymitch were the only ones who treated her without the caution of blown glass, or the resentment of the dark horse mentors who hated her relative good fortune. For Haymitch, while he obviously cared deeper than he wanted to admit about people, she suspected it was at least in part because he’d been scraping the bottom of the barrel enough himself as a disgrace that he instinctively reached out to her as the pariah of this group, and out of guilt for Finnick. He’d helped save her four years ago, but he barely knew her.

Drowning again, with nobody to save her—she struggled against the voices rising in her mind, a mix of the Thirteen woman and Johanna and others, _cried on stage at the reaping weak crazy cried so stupid so weak you’re not one of us you’re just Finnick’s fucktoy what happens when he gets tired of you they’re all so tired of dragging you along weak weak weak crazy Annie Annie’s gone crazy won’t make it in the war barely a victor why do you think they hid you away can’t stand alone can you weak weak pathetic._ Finnick wasn’t here. Mags wasn’t here. Carrick wasn’t here. She had to handle this one on her own, and she didn’t have to worry about making ripples this time. Quiet Annie who lived a good, smart Four life and so did her best to keep what was important hidden beneath the surface and not risk getting anyone hurt was done. They’d killed Mags, probably killed Finnick, done who knew what with Carrick, and she was done with being the good Four pet. She was done with being seen as too weak to stand alongside the rest of them too—as if the arena hadn’t been its own badge of suffering. _I’m a victor too. Respect that when you talk to me and not just when someone else challenges us._

Anger gave her strength enough to break the surface and shove the voices back down into the black waters of her mind. “I know I was lucky, all right? I know I was lucky to be a Career, lucky to grow up with enough to eat and some luxuries you never had, lucky to be trained and prepared for the arena, lucky to know that until I was sixteen I was safe from the arena, lucky to have Mags and Carrick and the others there for me, lucky to have Finnick love me, lucky to not be pimped out, and lucky that my problems got me off the hook while yours got you hurt, all right? I know all that, and if this has to become a contest, _you win_ , Johanna, fine, you had it a lot worse. But most of that’s the Capitol’s fault, not mine, so how long are you going to keep resenting me for it?” She shook her head impatiently, feeling like a boat in motion crashing towards the dock but unable to help herself. “Or are you secretly going to resent all the people and the districts who haven’t suffered as much as you, even as you’re on camera mouthing words about unity and equality?”

She’d gone too far, of course, and she sensed someone there at the corner of her vision, but didn’t turn to look. She was almost certain that it was Haymitch having kept a careful eye on things, tense and ready to spring into action if need be. Whether it was to protect her, or Johanna, or both, she had no idea. But she kept her eyes on Johanna instead, well aware that to look away was to admit the weakness that dismissive glance had accused her of owning. _Them’s my words, Johanna, as Mags would say. Do what you want with ‘em._

She watched the rage warring with some other emotion on Johanna’s face, those brown eyes burning hot, but then suddenly Johanna smiled, and it wasn’t a dangerous, wolfish smile, it was something genuine, amused and maybe a little relieved. “Well, well, roomie, so long as you realize there’re a few things you don’t know shit about, we’re good. But you’ve got some bite left in you after all. _We’ll_ ,” she emphasized the word carefully, “need that from you.”

So apparently that was as close as she’d get to an acknowledgement of her words. She’d take it. She smiled back at Johanna. “Want to go a round?” she offered, gesturing out to the training mats.

“You’re on,” Johanna said cheerfully. Apparently that was the secret—being willing to make ripples, and assert herself. She could stand on her own. She would. If it meant therapy with Aurelius and learning to speak up again, so be it. She would do it, and she would fight back, against the Capitol and anyone else who tried to cut her down. She’d find her place among these victors, and in Thirteen, and in the war.

As she passed Haymitch, he gave a soft chuckle, regarding her with interest as if suddenly, she too had become someone to him instead of just a responsibility passed to him for Finnick’s sake. “Trust me, sweetheart, she’ll actually respect you more if you speak up and have it out,” he murmured lowly to her. She gave him a clumsy pat on the shoulder as acknowledgment of that, grateful for the advice.

~~~~~~~~~~

Days went by, weeks—Gloss had no certainty of the clock anymore. Sometimes he’d started to believe he was the only person left on earth, stuck in this miserable cinderblock cell, the dim fluorescent lights always on, the damp pervading through it to the point he suspected if he was here in winter—whenever winter came—he’d end up with a hell of a cough from it.

But he couldn’t be entirely alone. Food came, and water, regularly enough that he didn’t experience the hunger and thirst of the arena. They came in occasionally, Capitol Peacekeepers in their black berets and white uniforms, to ask him the same questions. The rebellion’s plans, how far the conspiracy went, what he’d known, who else was involved. He’d sit there in that chair, buckled in tight from armpits to ankles with old leather straps dyed dark with the sweat or blood of previous inhabitants, reeking with the ghosts of that and the acrid scent of fear.

They hadn’t hurt him—yet. But he held no illusions that they wouldn’t, eventually. They wouldn’t trust his answers until they were written in tears and fears and screams and blood. Maybe not even then. _I’m a victor,_ he reminded himself. _I survived the arena._ He’d never held illusions that people didn’t regard him as the weaker twin, the one in Cashmere’s shadow, and honestly, she was so determined to grab the reins that it wasn’t so much weakness that made him step back, it was the realization that he wasn’t enough of an arrogant ass to feel the need to fight for it. 

In a way, Gloss imagined someone like Finnick understood him better than his own sister. Finnick had always been a contented follower too, listening to the wisdom of wiser or more assertive personalities like Mags and Carrick and the rest of them. They asserted themselves when they needed to, or struck out on their own when it was needed, but neither of them jumped to get into the vicious catfights of leadership.

At least, he would have said he understood Finnick. That was before the Quell and Finnick breaking the alliance. Still, Gloss suspected it wasn’t so much Finnick’s grand adoration of Katniss Everdeen as much as opportunism and following the lead of others. He couldn’t fault that. He’d argued with Cash about joining the alternative pack, seeing the benefit of it. Finnick and Johanna were dependable fighters both—Katniss was utterly useless as a melee fighter and he’d been unsure about Peeta’s killer instinct, but they’d have the sponsors and the attention, and the best opportunity to take those two out when the time came.

Cashmere had refused to even consider it. “If Finnick wants to defect, that’s fine,” she said. “But I trust Brutus and Baria to play it honorably as far as they can. Who do you want to ally us with, Gloss? Finnick, our sweet little snake-tongued backstabber who can focus without guilt on killing us all because now his little girlfriend is safe and even he’s not dumb enough to think Mags will survive? Johanna, that hypocrite who’ll throw someone to the wolves the moment she thinks it’ll serve her? And that stupid little Twelve bitch and her moony-eyed boyfriend who’ll be in it only for themselves too? If Haymitch was in it, _maybe_ I’d trust it because he’s always dealt square with us—“

“Last year?” he pointed out sharply, well in mind of how Haymitch had guilelessly played them to get his boy into the pack.

“That was him finally playing like a Career, can’t fault him for it,” she said dryly. “He even screwed over Finnick on that one. Point is, he did what he had to do, and no more. So him, I’d trust up until the pack tears apart. And you know Finnick for sure would defer to him, the girl and Johanna too for that matter. He could hold them in line, but he’s not the male tribute for Twelve, is he? Peeta’s only out for himself and Katniss. He doesn’t give a single fuck about any of us. And this is new territory, Gloss, we need to stick to the things we can rely on so that we can focus on what we can’t.”

She’d been right about the details and she’d have been right if the Games had gone on as usual, because the pack would have been torn apart even quicker with almost all the major players in an alliance. But whether from dumb luck or instincts he hadn’t understood, he’d been right in the spirit of what was actually going on beneath everything. Worst thing was that he had no idea where Chantilly and Niello must have known, and hidden it from them. But Haymitch and Chantilly had been thick as thieves back in the day, no way he’d hidden the whole thing from one of his oldest friends. Where were their mentors now? Had they really been sold out by their own district? 

Sitting there in that cell, huddled up on the slab that passed for his bunk, he couldn’t help but think that he should have pushed harder. He should have insisted. But amiable Gloss had followed her lead.

He’d watched the hovercraft beam take her, barely five feet away from him, and they’d left him behind, left him to this. The one thing he could rely upon was that Cash hadn’t sold him out. They were the only people worthy of trust. Years of hard experience taught him that. They either looked at him and thought _weak_ or _sisterfucker_ or both. Even Finnick had cooled towards him in recent years.

He sat in his cell and he’d never felt more alone. Even in the arena the first time, he’d been confident that Jasper was fully on his side as the One male mentor, and of course Cashmere would do her duty towards Chalcedony, but she’d push for his survival, and Chalcedony must have known she would be the sacrifice that year because she’d died suspiciously early. He’d never been entirely alone in that arena. He was now, and it weighed on him the silence and the uncertainty.

Once in a while they gave him a bucket of cold water and a small flake of harsh soap, to hastily wash, staring at him all the while. No towel. He’d sit naked on his bunk, shivering, until he dried off and could put the faded grey shirt and trousers back on. The guards always stood in the cell and watched him wash as if he’d hide the soap up his ass and use it to miraculously escape later.

Didn’t much matter on that score—the entire Capitol had seen him skimpily dressed, and those who went for pay-to-view had seen him bare-ass naked, cock and everything, fucking Johanna and Finnick. Never Cashmere, not on camera—that was a taboo they reserved not for the average Capitol asshole sitting on a couch with their trousers down, but only for those who could pay well for the privilege of Gloss and Cashmere Donovan, in person. Incest was just another of those naughty things they wanted kept quiet, dirty little secret that it was. It just wouldn’t do for people to find out that their Secretary of Transportation liked making either of them suck him off while fucking each other.

The Peacekeepers hadn’t been there for a few days. Or at least, he thought it had been days. Maybe it had been hours or weeks, how could he know? Start counting the number of times he took a piss? He shook his head, hands raking through his hair in frustrated agitation. No, they wouldn’t make that much of an animal out of him. Breathing in deeply, he tried to relax. He’d always had that over Cash’s energetic impatience. 

They came again, and this time he was ready. “Let me talk to the President,” he protested. “I had nothing to do with this rebellion of theirs. Look, you saw I wasn’t even in their damn alliance!”

“Your sister apparently was, along with Chantilly,” the younger one said, probably around thirty. Broad-shouldered, blond and fair, he had classically handsome features that would have made him a killer tribute for One in his youth. 

He filed that nugget of information away. So Niello hadn’t known? “I don’t know anything about it,” he said again.

“Yeah, we heard, but it’s shower time,” the older one grunted, jerking his head towards the door. “Eyes forward, mouth shut.” Eyeing the unlit shock-probe in the man’s hand, Gloss decided it was much better to not risk it. He’d learned from a young age to bide his time and wait for the right chance to act. It would be stupid right now.

But he almost blurted _Shower?_ , snapping his mouth shut just in time. Walking out the door, he felt shaky as a newborn colt. His legs, unused to so much use, didn’t want to hold him up properly and walk, or balance correctly. The walk up the stairs winded him to the point he gasped raggedly by the time they reached a grey-painted metal door, but he didn’t stop or even hesitate, all too aware of the buzzing of electricity right behind him. Only once he was inside did he lurch and grab a metal divider, legs aching. Looking down, he saw the tile on the floor, raising his head and seeing it extended all around the walls as well. They partitioned the room into various stalls, and each held a metal showerhead. So they hadn’t lied—unless they meant to kick the shit out of him while he was here after lulling him into cooperation.

Surprise upon surprise—there was a towel hanging over the divider, fresh clothes, and a caddy with a washcloth, and soap, and shampoo, a comb, toothpaste and a toothbrush. He could have cried, staring at it, reaching out to touch it and make sure it wasn’t an illusion.

He turned on the water, glancing back at the guards for a moment to see if they would urge him to get in, even as the flow remained icy cold. They’d actually backed off, obviously staying there, but not watching. 

He waited until the water grew warm, and then dared to crank it up even more as they still didn’t yell about him wasting it. He wanted it almost as hot as he could stand to scrub the accumulated grime off his skin, plus the heat would feel good against the aches of his body, constant now from the hard bed and the eternal damp. Stripping off his stinking prison clothes, he stepped into the shower stall, sighing with bliss at the heat. It was the first time he’d been genuinely warm since…well, since that jungle hellhole. He never thought he’d have missed heat after that, but the damp chill of this place seemed to have seeped into his very bones.

Absorbed in the pleasure of being warm and scrubbing himself clean, he startled suddenly to hear another faucet starting up, glancing over to see someone else two stalls down. He didn’t see her face, but that deep burnt caramel skin, the broad shoulders, and the dark, wild hair---it startled him to realize he hadn’t seen Cecelia’s hair since watching tapes of her Games as a cadet, with the Capitol forcing her to give up an Eight woman’s headscarf. He averted his eyes instinctively, having the weird feeling that she’d rather have had him see her breasts than her hair. Eight was strange like that. 

Now even as he continued to wash, dawdling and taking the risk that any moment now they’d bark at him and tell him to finish up, he tried to be aware of others coming in and steal surreptitious glances. More of them came in soon—Niello, too far away for Gloss to talk to him, Finnick who coolly looked around at all of them, and then a girl he didn’t recognize. She wasn’t from One, despite fair hair and light eyes that was common to most artisans from One—she showed no recognition of him. She wasn’t a victor. That he knew for certain.

He tried to not think about the last shower this long, the night after they’d first forced him and Cashmere to fuck each other. That was one of the few times that proud poise of hers had shattered, and after he’d come back from his shower she’d finally broke down and cried, and he’d so wanted to reach out and hold her like he had when they were kids, and make it all right. She might be the leader, but he was always the one who could provide her with that stable center when her lofty plans crashed and burned. But he couldn’t bear to touch her that night, and he’d seen on her face she couldn’t bear to touch him. It was all dirty and shameful now. He’d scrubbed for what seemed like hours but couldn’t get the ghost of her skin off his, because the awful reality was seared into his mind.

He reached for the washcloth and scrubbed even harder at the memory, get rid of the sick feeling once again of the helpless physical pleasure he’d always found in her body, and the silent screaming going on his mind every single fucking time.

He’d found her with a knife to her wrists after that first summer. And after all that training, Cashmere was every bit as aware as Gloss exactly where to cut and how long it took to bleed out. “Chantilly can mentor another girl soon enough,” she said, eerily calm, tracing the line of the blade over the pale underside of her arm, sunlight rippling off it in a bright shine. “Besides, me dying in a ‘tragic accident’,” of course they’d claim it was a tragic accident because fuck knew no victor would ever commit suicide because why on earth would they ever have cause to be miserable, “will make the sponsors want to replace me with a new girl soon enough.”

She’d wanted him to stop her, because she’d let him take the knife from her hand, and crouch down in front of her, and tell her that they’d find a way to go on. They’d mentor a One victor in time and that would be the end of it, or they’d get too old and the Capitol would lose interest. “We don’t let them win, Cash,” he’d urged her. “We’re survivors.”

She’d smiled at him, a genuine smile rather than that cuttingly arrogant one she put on for the cameras. “Maybe I’m the smarter one, but you’re the stronger one, little brother.” She’d reached out and hugged him, touched him without Capitol force for the first time in months. “Stay by me and I can make it,” she’d whispered in his ear.

He wondered if she was making it now, wherever they’d taken her. Maybe they’d killed her for being uncooperative—no, Haymitch wouldn’t allow that, would he?

His skewed sense of time couldn’t tell him for sure, but he thought it had been at least ten or fifteen minutes before one of the guards finally said, “All right, finish up.”

Reluctantly, he washed the last suds from his skin, seeing the pink of it from the heat and the scrubbing. Shutting the water off, he reached for the towel, drying off as much as he could and then dressing in the clean clothes. They felt cloud-soft on his skin. 

It was too kind, too neat, for him to not suspect strings. A hot shower, toiletries, clean clothes, and the first glimpse he’d had of his fellow victors since it all happened. But he’d been trained since childhood to look deeper. They might think he was stupid, amiable Gloss, his sister’s puppet, disgusting Gloss who fucked his sister, but it was better for them to think that. If they could dismiss him so easily, they’d underestimate him. He’d counted on that in his first Games, and it worked like a charm. What was the game here?

The guards led them down the hallway, away from the stairway back down to their previous cell. “In here,” one said, indicating a common area with heavy, solid tables and benches bolted to the floor, and a row of doors open to show the cells within, cells with an actual blanket and pillow on the beds, and he’d bet that there was a mattress as well.

“What is this?” Cecelia finally asked, her voice steady and firm. They’d given her a bandana to cover her hair, the same drab grey as the clothes, but the Eight victor seemed to stand a bit taller and prouder with it.

“You’ve been upgraded from persons of interest to protective custody.”

“Which means?” the blond girl queried in a soft voice. Twelve accent—well, that answered where she was from, but not who she was.

“It means,” Gloss told them wryly, “we’re not under suspicion anymore as rebels, but we’re going to be their guests,” meaning hostages, really, “for the time being.” Apparently Finnick had done a pretty piece of lying that he’d gotten out of it.

Sitting at the tables at the guards’ command, now he finally got a good look at Finnick as the Four victor sat opposite him. His eyes went immediately to that empty left sleeve, tied up in a knot. If he had to guess, Gloss would say that Finnick had managed that, even one-handed. Deft hands the man had too—Gloss had experienced that firsthand back in the day. “Mutts got me,” Finnick said with a shrug of his shoulders and a slight twist of his lips. “Venomous teeth and that shitty jungle air didn’t help. When I woke up in that cell the arm was gone. Must have lopped it off when they had me knocked out.”

There was something off about him, something that only someone who’d been Finnick’s close friend for several years could have pegged. But finally Gloss put a finger on it, identifying a slight and very subtle blankness in his expression, and how he tried a little too hard to summon emotions as if having to think it over and make a conscious effort. As if something in Finnick had been flattened or burned away—then he mentally smacked himself. The man had been in captivity for however long, lost the women he’d loved like a grandmother in that arena, his girlfriend might be dead for all he knew, and he’d lost an arm to boot. “Sorry,” he said, meaning it.

Finnick nodded at that. “No point fussing, bigger problems at work, right?” he said in an undertone, nodding towards the guards with a cagey look on his face. He glanced over towards the blond girl, sitting next to Cecelia now. “So who are you, dear?”

“Madge Undersee.” She looked sixteen or seventeen at best, her blond hair raggedly short-cropped. But she had the eyes of someone who’d seen too much. “They held…whatever number they’re giving it. A replacement Quell of sorts. Dumped us in a canyon with weapons parachuted in, and they had the reaping-age families and friends of the tributes and mentors in the actual Quell.”

“So how’d you end up in that mess?” Finnick asked.

“Katniss was my friend,” she said quietly. “And I expect…my aunt died in the Second Quell. She was Haymitch’s ally. So maybe that came into play as well.”

Cousin Vair was the only child Gloss could think of that fit the bill. Fuck, poor Vair. He’d never been in the Academy, never trained for the arena, a gentle artist who loved to do nothing but paint. In a way, the boy reminded Gloss a lot of Peeta. He’d have been no better than a trembling dark horse tribute in there, and this girl sitting there told him that Vair must have died in that bloodbath. “Damn,” he said heavily.

“Where are we?” she asked, looking at them with an edge of quiet desperation. “I assume we’re in the Capitol, but…”

Cecelia’s arm wrapped around Madge’s shoulders, murmuring something low and soft to her, and now Gloss once again recalled her three kids at home. All younger than this girl, too young for the reaping which was good fortune for them, but still, a parent was a parent, and that was something he and Finnick had no clue about handling. “Do you know what they did with the young ones?” she asked Madge, an edge of desperation to her voice.

“No,” Madge said. “The littles from Twelve…I didn’t see any of them after they took me, Rory, and Prim away on a hovercraft after the executions.”

Primrose Everdeen—so apparently Snow had cleaned house thoroughly when it came to the Everdeens. “Wait, executions?” he interjected.

Like that, they heard about the deaths in Twelve, and from there, no hard task to extrapolate out to One. He hadn’t needed to witness it. He had that awful, bone-deep certainty that his mom and dad were dead, and Pashmina too. Pash’s wife Beryl had been dead two years, and they hadn’t adopted kids, so that left fewer targets. Still, for parents and a sister he’d left behind him at six years old to become a cadet, whom he’d barely thought about in years except as a distant memory, it hit him with a curious pang of pain and guilt.

He looked at Cecelia and saw in her bleak expression that she realized she’d been widowed for weeks and not known it. His own guilt and grief seemed to pale in comparison at her stoically trying to fight back tears. Finnick looked eerily blank again, as if the death of his parents, his brother Keith, and all the rest of his family, didn’t even touch him. Gloss had to suppose he was so overloaded there wasn’t room for it to settle.

Shit. The girl had been forced to watch it, and then go fight in what sounded like a cruel throwback to the earliest Games—pure murder. “You’re with us now, kid,” he told her quietly, meeting her eyes. Maybe being a victor wasn’t a burden anyone wanted. Even those in One and Two and Four who sought it by training and volunteering did it only as part of the greater burden for their district. But it was a burden shared, if nothing else.

The others came in then—all the captured mentors. As he watched the processing, ticking off the names and districts, it looked like Snow had netted all of them to be safe, all the way from Niello to prickly Lizzie to Taffeta, the mother of a Games stylist, to old deaf Cotton and cringing Rice, though Gloss noted the absence of Lyme, Annie Cresta, Chantilly, and Haymitch. With a nod towards the three of them at the table, he got up and approached Niello. The fact they’d been allowed to mill around and talk this long told him plenty.

“They’re spoiling us now because they want us grateful and off our guard,” he said quietly, wasting no time.

“That and chatty,” Niello returned in an undertone, arms folded over his chest. He looked exhausted, older than his years right then. “They got nothing from interrogations, so this is the next step. I imaging we’ll be let out of our cells to mingle.”

“You think Snow knows we’re all old hands at watching what we say?” Gloss asked him with a wry smile.

“Snow’s off the deep end, trust me,” Niello said. “I did what damage control I could when he hauled me in his office and tried to deflect all the blame onto the ones that escaped. Tilly included.”

“Did what you had to do, and you’re one of the few that Snow would actually listen to, Niel. We both know that.” In that moment he decided to not ask how much Niello had known, or not. Not right now, anyway. There was much more at stake, and they all needed to focus on sticking together for now and surviving this, not squabbling. He’d always respected Niello, more so than Jasper. There was something bitter and harsh about Jasper beneath his breezy smiles. Niello was fox-clever in his way—a man who’d done his best to improve the lot of his district. Using his position as one of Snow’s favored sons, the first victor of Snow’s regime, it had definitely helped for both One and victors at large. Not that the victors had it easy, but it was less brutal than it had been, to hear the oldest victors talk about it, and victors had gained privileges too. The stories he’d heard from Chela and the like still gave him nightmares. 

Niello blew out his breath in a shaky sigh. “Plus he has my kids, Gloss. Sending them to Two to become Peacekeepers, but if I fuck up, I know they’re dead. So all of us, we need to be very careful and behave. Rein this lot in if need be on how to do it. Because if one of us fucks up, I honestly think Snow will clean house and kill us all.” Duplicity was second nature to a One victor, and thinking about both the reality and the necessary mask. 

Gloss nodded, reassured now as he glanced around the room at the others, seeing no looks of judgment. If Cecelia was any indication, and Finnick’s renewed friendly overtures too, apparently the days of being treated like a gullible, stupid pervert among the other victors were over. They weren’t alone any longer. That meant they could survive it, so long as they were careful. “We’ll get by,” he said, and the look Niello gave him, one of gratitude and trust, told him plenty. 

Neither of them mentioned any hope of rescue. But if two forceful women like Chantilly and Cashmere were out there pushing for it, and Haymitch with that damn need of his to look after the other victors and manipulate people to get it done, Gloss would bet they could retain at least a little hope. Life seemed a little brighter than just a few hours ago. The trick now was to not get complacent, and stay on his guard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Going to rework the earliest chapters just a wee bit to keep Cecelia alive, since I realized I've never gotten the chance to write the poor woman, so this was a great chance to do it!


	23. Chapter 23

To Haymitch’s profound relief, he passed the physical tests for Thirteen’s field clearance. Running still left him more fatigued than the youthful likes of Cashmere, his much-abused body protesting the last lingering signs of shaking off the booze and the withdrawal. Though he felt some solace in the fact that at least Blight and Clover didn’t find it that easy either, so it wasn’t just him, and Johanna’s snarking teasing prodded all four of them along until the end. Better they were all together than with Brutus and Lyme, who despite their ages were fitness nuts from Two and made it look contemptuously easy.

But his hands were steady on the rifle, his mind clear enough to easily pass the marksmanship. Close combat was where he excelled as usual. Put a knife in his hand and his instincts kicked in. He felt confident that the Block itself held no terrors for him when he stepped into the testing simulator. Sending him in alone, testing his ability to react to combat and enemy fire and all the rest—he’d endured the arena, he’d fought in Ten and Nine. This wouldn’t rattle him. He wove his way through the urban environment, preferring to find another route and sneak past the enemy troops if possible or, if need be, stab them rather than starting a massive firefight. He started idly thinking to himself that this wasn’t going to help them. Maybe in some places—Eight and Six and the Capitol, true. But to take back Seven and the like? This training simulator was useless. They’d have to rely, as he’d told Coin, on people who understood the terrain and the tactics and weren’t trained into this rigid lockstep Thirteen way of thinking. Though it had succeeded in Nine and Ten, hadn’t it? Even now Thirteen soldiers were fighting in various districts, learning to adapt, overcoming their narrow training.

He was barely a hundred feet from the exit point when they played footage of a young soldier, barely bore than a girl by the wavering break in her voice from the pain, screaming that he was shot, down and injured. _Regina Jordan._ Now the voice had a name and he couldn’t imagine the girl’s features, the hair color, the height and build, but that twisted expression of fear that made it so clear that there was still so much of the child there, the terror of facing death with so little of life lived—oh, that was too clear to him. He’d seen it on that monitor too many times to count. And it blurred, and the voice became Katniss Everdeen, with her throat gushing blood and her choked death-rattles and wide-staring eyes, or Fern Matthews, dumped in the grass like so much discarded trash with her head bashed in, a long line of kids all the way back to Dean Gordon, tiny and twelve and stabbed to death by Brutus right at the Cornucopia.

He turned before he even thought about it, and he ran back to where Regina said she’d be, rifle at the ready to attack them or defend her, realizing that he had no supplies to use the medic training because _this was a fucking simulation wasn’t it_ , and that thought brought him up short. Just then a cool, sharp voice ordered him through his earphones, “Abernathy, remember your orders. No other objectives—the area’s too hot. Proceed directly to the extraction point.”

The voice was simply a voice, meant to test him. He had the feeling that particular obstacle was chosen with him in mind and that stirred his anger fiercely—mindfucking him, were they any better than the Capitol? Testing to see if he could abandon an injured and dying child? _You fuckers, I’ve had to do that for years and years. I can do it, if you make me. I’ll just hate you for it until the day I die._

The boiling heat of rage almost overcame him—but the rational edge reasserted itself. So maybe Aurelius was doing him some good. _They’ll fail you if you argue with them. Pass their test and then you can go fight in reality where it’s not so simple as following their damn orders._ “Of course,” he said coolly, gripping his rifle more tightly and heading down the street, weaving his way through the rubble again and passing the handful of dummies he’d “killed” along the way, with absurdly bright red bloodstains on their white uniforms. Real blood didn’t look like that, and it certainly didn’t have the sticky-sweet smell. They were only playing at war here, and acting like they knew everything. “I wasn’t sure whether being trained as a medic meant I was obliged to respond, you know.”

Apparently the tester missed the sarcastic edge Haymitch gave his words. “You weren’t ordered to respond to the wounded. Proceed to the extraction point.” Frankly, it was a sad thing to him when someone had to be directly given orders to go try to help someone in pain—in his book, that ought to be pretty much assumed.

He passed, and now even Coin couldn’t find more excuses to keep him from getting out in the field. He was a better-trained fighter than any of her own troops by this point, given his actual combat experience. Though the slow simmer of anger remained alive and well, and fed the feeling of being flayed and betrayed by these so-called allies.

Cleaned up and assured that he, Blight, Clover, and Johanna would meet the rest of their squad soon, he headed down for his shift in the infirmary, trying to get the voice of that dying girl-soldier out of his head. He’d been lucky enough those first few weeks of combat out on the prairie. Moving swift and light and striking from a position of surprise in their raids, they hadn’t had many wounded or killed, and he wasn’t the medic expected to take care of them anyway. But the Capitol was alerted now, the war was on, and some places would be more fortified, and would come at a much higher cost. Already the mounting casualty reports from the fighting in Eleven and Four made the few losses taken to date by the Phoenix’s Raiders in Nine and Ten look like nothing. He would watch more people die, and in trying to save lives with his own two hands and rolls of bandages, he wouldn’t always succeed. More than the Block and Thirteen’s other tests, it was his own mind and heart that asked him, _You ready for this?_

He had no good answer for that: flawed and broken vessel that he already was, he couldn’t say with confidence that he could bear the strain forever. But at least there was a glimmer of light at the end of this, something worth the struggle, rather than bringing all he could offer in will and intelligence and charm to bear simply in pursuit of producing another killer-child and potential whore for the Capitol to devour and destroy. _I’ll have to be ready,_ he told himself. Not for his own sake, but for the sake of everyone depending on him now that he’d helped set this thing in motion, he would have to bear up under the weight. But at least, unlike before, he wasn’t alone in the burden—Johanna stood beside him in this, as he did for her, and that made all the difference.

Still, for a few golden moments, the four of them stood there, united as a team, relieved to have made it through. Of all people out there, he’d trust fellow victors the most in a complicated fight like the one that lay ahead, one that required more than the simple ability to fire a rifle and take orders. Unlike the Games, they could have each other’s backs and never have to worry about a forced betrayal.

On their way topside to celebrate it with a walk in the fresh air, he tried his best to clear his mind. The thought of the forest above, blazing with the colors of early October, almost never failed to help. It certainly didn’t hurt that he didn’t walk those woods alone, and unlike when he was raw from the arena and trying to conceal his freak-outs from Burt and Jonas, panicking at squirrels and the like, Johanna and the others instinctively understood. Perhaps his time out on the prairie had helped as well.

Fog caught up to him right before the elevator to the surface. “Coin’s going to call a strategy meeting tomorrow,” he informed Haymitch, eyes searching Haymitch’s face as if watching for a reaction.

“Your network’s got something new, then?” He’d done his best to get over his childhood dislike of the man, aware now of how much lay beneath the surface and how little he’d truly understood. That didn’t mean he instinctively liked Phineas Fog now, even if Haymitch did owe him for saving his ma, and Briar, and Johanna’s parents for that matter. He could acknowledge that, but still, trying to reconcile it all took time. Besides, he was too damn old to need a father, especially when he’d never had one at all.

Fog leaned back against the wall, arms folded over his chest. He’d missed shaving this morning, white stubble obvious on his cheeks and chin—never had in all the years Haymitch had seen him growing up, shaved as pristine as the uniform he wore. Presumably, part of the Peacekeeper dress code. He’d never seen a Peacekeeper with facial hair, come to think of it. Was he simply distracted or what? Eyeing the man further, he decided from the darkness around Fog’s eyes that it might be something else. “Keeping late hours, mm? So what’s happening that you’ve pulled together so much information in a rush to need burning the midnight candle?”

That actually earned him a faint smile. “Good eye. You’d have made a good intelligence officer yourself.”

“’Peacekeeper’ wasn’t high on my list of life goals,” he retorted instinctively. Then he realized how petty it sounded and sighed, shaking his head. “Never mind. ‘Victor’ wasn’t on the list either, but hell, nobody really got what they wanted under the regime we’ve got. So what’s up?” 

“We’re going to have to work together on this one to convince Coin to commit. So I wanted to give you enough time to think ahead on it, and to get your team ready besides, as your friend Clover’s got a niece and a couple nephews in the bunch, doesn’t she?” He hesitated again, scratched at his chin with one thumb, and said quietly, “They’ve located the missing kids held down in northern District Four, a stronghold of some loyalist diehards there. They’re due to move to District Two at the end of the week. Presumably bound for the Peacehome.” Now he looked away slightly and his voice went even softer, its usual gruff edge ground down to nothing, leaving him sounding curiously vulnerable. “I don’t imagine they’ve been at them yet with the jacker venom, Haymitch. It would leave them with memories of captivity to explain away. They’ll do it once they’re safe in Two. There’s still time to get them before…”

“Before they all end up like Ash, and Johanna’s Heike,” he said grimly, immediately following Fog’s train of thought. He looked at Fog and couldn’t help but ask, “Did you know Snow would do that to Ash when you…”

“Never,” he said firmly. But something fierce entered his eyes, a challenge of sorts. “But even if I’d known, he’s better off amnesiac and alive than dead—being a victor, I imagine you agree that survival’s worth the price?”

He felt the twist of the knife with those words, placed precisely right in the heart. He had to agree or else sound like a hypocrite. “Of course,” he answered, not having to lie. Better than Ash was alive at any cost. Better that Briar had lived, even if it meant sacrificing her youth to the Peacekeeper Corps, but the picture of her with her husband proved she was still a braver person than him—she’d found a way to love someone and be loved, despite the cost of all those years of lies and pain. 

He looked at Fog again, seeing those golden-brown eyes, the dark olive skin. _Seven blood,_ Johanna had said. Plus the conviction of _something_ behind those words about kids being made to forget and recruited to the Corps, as if there was an old wound there rather than simple passion. “That what happened to you?” he asked, before he could help himself. “Did they erase your memories and send you to wear that uniform?”

“They didn’t have to,” Fog said, arms crossing protectively over his chest, looking away. “Do the math. I was only five or six when the war began—the last war, I mean. I was six when it was all over, so they tell me. Maybe that’s not even my real birthday. Don’t know whether my parents died fighting in the war, got killed as civilian casualties, or they were executed as rebels.” He gave a half-shrug. “Even being born in Seven’s only a guess of mine, from my looks. Could be Six or even Eleven as well, everyone’s blood was a bit more mixed back then, but I’ve got a few dim memories of forests that fit Seven best. Never going to know for sure, though—not that, not my old name, not who my parents were. But I was so young. All of us that they spared and sent to Two were, because they thought we were salvageable. The older orphans were left back home.” Like Haymitch’s own family, relics of the community home with families dead and shattered by the Dark Days. “They gave us new names, adopted us out to Peacekeeper families. The Fogs, they were kind to me. No kids of their own. And when you’ve got nothing to forget, and you spend all those years hearing the right things, it’s so easy to believe that you’re far better off in the Corps than dying cutting logs or mining coal.”

He didn’t say it, but Haymitch had the sense Fog could imagine all too well how things had been for Ash all this time. No memories, nothing but what he was told, desperate to find a place to fit in and belong. Something ached within him to imagine it, but it must be so much worse for this old man, who’d lived that life of being torn up by the roots and remade. In that moment, he found it easy to believe Fog actually gave a fierce damn about rescuing those kids in Four that he’d made it a priority to come to Haymitch with this, because obviously he wanted to spare them that same fate. War orphans, most of them too young to remember much—yeah, Fog could relate to that. It was an odd image to picture the Head Peacekeeper he’d always loathed when he was young as a scared, lost child himself, committed to the care of kind stranger who’d given him a name and a home and molded him into the ideal Peacekeeper.

Fog must have seen some kind of understanding on Haymith’s face, because he nodded slightly, catching Haymitch’s eye. No need to say anything, and Haymitch felt relieved at that. It was better to catch up on the thread of where they’d been going and let the moment pass gracefully. “It’s a loyalist stronghold, you said?” He sighed, trying to imagine exactly what that was going to involve.

“Don’t think about it, bo—Haymitch.” Fog shook his head, lips in a tight, grim line. ‘They’re held in Soledad City.”

“Means nothing to me, sorry. The only place I’ve ever seen in Four was Victors’ Bayou.”

“Of course,” Fog muttered, looking chagrined with himself, waving a hand in an irritated gesture. “I keep forgetting…anyway. Soledad is Four’s major depot—everything goes through it.” His voice took on the clipped, matter-of-fact tone that made Haymitch imagine him talking to new Peacekeepers in just the same way, back in the day, giving them the essential information about their new assignment. The years fell away in that moment and it was all too easy to imagine him thirty years ago, an imposing figure in his white uniform. But fair—fair as he could have been. Haymitch could admit that now, and be honest that his biggest objection to Fog was that supposed exploitation of Magnolia Abernathy’s desperation. It had been so much easier to hate Fog for it too than to allow his own guilt to grow, well aware even at that age that a widow on her own with kids was vulnerable, and that he and Ash dragged her down. “Supplies go through and get distributed to the various villages, the seafood passes through on its way to the Capitol. It’s nothing like those farms you were fighting. It’s a major population center, more like the big cities in Eight and Six.”

“And here I was hoping ‘City’ was them just being pretentious.” Fog obliged him with a snort of amusement. “So, a fair-sized city full of Capitol loyal fanatics. Outstanding. Mama Coin’s not gonna like the idea of us leading a raid there.”

“Try harder,” Fog said.

That did it, and he rounded on Fog, staring him down, a swell of fierce hatred rising up within him, thinking of all those kids he’d tried to save and couldn’t, afraid that he would add to the tally now. “Do you have any clue how many people think that’s all it would ever take for me to save a kid’s life? All Haymitch Abernathy needs to do is _fucking well try harder._ You can’t talk these people into shit they’ve already written off. You can beg and plead and charm and hey, with some you can even fuck, but if they’ve made up their minds these kids aren’t worth it, it’s not happening!”

Unlike most, Fog didn’t seem terrified by a killer raging at him. But his expression turned chagrined. “Poor choice of words. I’m sorry. I mean that we’ve got to figure something out. You—we—get one good chance at this before everything those kids were is lost.”

“And you have an idea, I assume.”

A grin answered him there, the cocky smile of a man who was on the game and enjoyed it. It was like looking in the mirror—well, the mirror of himself forty years older, anyway. Johanna saw it immediately. He wondered if he would have seen it himself now, older and wiser than the child he’d been. “Victors’ families are an important bargaining chip, but if he’s signing them over as Peacekeepers, and planning on hijacking their minds, he wants them as distant leverage, not active hostages.”

“Snow’s not an idiot—he’s a ruthless manipulative asshole, and getting insanely paranoid of late, but he’s not stupid. Unfortunately. He knows this has gotten beyond us, and there’s no calling off the war by making some threats to the victors.”

Fog nodded, his dark eyes thoughtfully intent. “I imagine if any of you are captured he could use the kids as a threat to make you give up valuable information, but in the meantime, he’ll make them serve in another way by signing them over to a future in the Corps. So, they’re not that high a priority—enough so that he wants the guards on them in the war, I imagine. And with all the hovercraft tied up running Peacekeepers to fortify different positions, they’re taking the kids by train.”

Now it dawned on him. “Plenty of things could happen to a train between Four and Two. And less risky than an assault in a city.” He’d argued himself into a corner there by telling Coin frankly that they weren’t ready to take on the urban districts.

“Exactly.” That cat-in-cream smile again. “So you take that and think about it overnight, yeah?”

“Thanks.” He surprised himself by admitting that, and giving Fog a genuine smile. “I’ll tell Clover and Blight about it too.” He turned to go, feeling like he should say something more, but not certain of what it was—too many old and confused feelings there for him to be certain.

“There’s one more thing you should know,” Fog said gruffly, stopping Haymitch in his tracks as he approached the ladder up to the surface checkpoint. Hand already on the rung, he half-turned, looking back. “Snow’s taking it seriously enough that he recalled all retired Peacekeepers under forty-five to active duty, to reinforce the existing troops.”

Well, they might be middle-aged, but as he’d proved on the Block, people not run down by a lifetime’s toil in the mines or at the loom or the like could still be more than physically fit for the fight. “So it’s escalating. Dangerous opponents too, I suppose. Those are some pretty seasoned Peacekeepers, not some knee-jerk eighteen-year-old kid.”

“I’m sure he’s counting on them as a known entity—twenty years of loyal service, supposedly less prone to being swayed by treasonous rhetoric than impressionable kids.” Fog smirked at that, obviously enjoying some private joke. Wryly, Haymitch understood that to mean that Snow was in for a surprise, and wondered just how extensive the thread of hidden betrayal ran in the Peacekeeper Corps, and for how long. But he was no reckless child himself to demand the knowledge—better he not ask. Some things he didn’t want to know, if worse came to worse and he were captured.

“And they’re only a couple years into retirement. Won’t have gone totally to seed yet.”

“Yes, well, he’s also swooped up the sixteen and seventeen-year-olds. They’ll start cadet training in a couple of weeks. So there’s that.” 

“With any luck they’re young enough we might be able to sway them away from the fight.”

“With luck. The retirees we have watching the training camps will turn who they can, and agents in the field will net some more.” But there was a hesitation there that Haymitch didn’t quite understand, and it took him a few moments of racking his brains to think of what it might be that Fog didn’t quite want to say.

“You meant Briar,” he said, finally getting it. It shouldn’t have taken him so long, but in a strange way, he’d managed to not feel the raw wound of her for the first time in twenty-five years. That letter from her, the admonition to not beat himself up, hearing that she was well and happy and in love, had helped. He couldn’t say he’d been totally unable to let go—a thorn grasped that long dug in deep and festered. But she hadn’t been a persistent, dull gnaw of grief and guilt these last weeks.

“Apollonia,” Fog corrected him, quietly but firmly reminding Haymitch that the girl she’d been was gone, replaced by the unknown woman she’d become, “is the one who sent me the intel on the kids. She and Rube both got sent to Soledad, and she’s hoping they’ll be on the train as well. Nice quiet reintroduction mission, I imagine.”

He nodded at that, the notion of seeing Briar again in person something that he couldn’t even wrap his brain around in that moment. True, it was in his mind as something that would happen, probably after the war, but he hadn’t imagined seeing her out there in the fight. “Then the kids are in good hands for now, as much as she can help them.” Posy and Vick were closer to their aunt than they knew.

“She won’t have broken cover,” Fog assured him dryly. “My point was—“

“I can handle seeing her again,” he cut Fog off, sensing the well-meaning concern and not ready to deal with it openly, sensing that Fog wasn’t quite sure how to deal with it either. After all, he’d never really had the chance to be a father, and gruff, distantly paternal concern was probably all a Head Peacekeeper was ever allowed to express. Strangely enough, he felt closer to Fog in that moment than he had yet, thanks to understanding that awkward discomfort and desire to help all too well. It felt a little too much like how he felt around Peeta. When the kid was desperate and on the edge, it let him dare more and reach out more openly, but in the day-to-day, he still had no fucking clue. “Thanks for the warning, though.” He turned back to the ladder, forcing his mind back into the track of the train issue, trying to think already just how he’d sell Coin on that mission. 

Plutarch—yeah, he’d get Plutarch on board for more pressure on Coin. It would be a hell of a coup as a propo if they could announce they’d recovered the victors’ families. Not that great a tactical victory, but sometimes, as he’d seen with the lukewarm fake crap Katniss and Peeta had needed to sell, what people needed most was something that gave their hearts and souls strength. 

Plus Lyme, Brutus, Annie, and Cashmere were all chomping at the bit to get to Two and cause a ruckus there, and if they went at the same time the rescue mission carried off, it would be a nice distraction as well with Snow’s attention focused to the north and not on that single train. The only trouble was if they got the kids and not the other victors, would Snow take it out on them? Shit.

He paused at the top of the ladder as Fog had a few last parting remarks. “I expect to extract Nola and Johanna’s parents in the next couple of weeks before Two gets too hot when the fight begins there. The more we’ve discussed it, the better we not risk their capture.”

“Good. Get ‘em here safe and sound.” Johanna would be overjoyed. He’d seen on her face that day that her feelings were much simpler than his.

“Nola sends her love, as ever.” The words hit home—someone who still loved him. Well, at least she imagined she did. Maybe she only loved the idea she had of him, extrapolated out so many years. She didn’t know him now, didn’t know all of what he’d done, didn’t know what he’d become. Still…if she could take the revelation that he’d been whored out and spinning lies for the majority of his adult life, and claim to love him anyway, maybe there was cause for some small kernel of belief. But as Aurelius had observed in their last session, seemed Haymitch wasn’t much in the business of growing hope when it came to himself. He’d rather forgotten how. “You could talk to her, you know.”

“I know. Tell her I love her. But for this, I’d rather talk to her in person.” Some things couldn’t be said so easily to a disembodied voice. Twenty-five years of loss and grief were one of them, and he had to look at her face, be able to see if she was disappointed in him, or how she truly felt. That couldn’t be done over the telephone.

“You’re your mother’s son, no doubt. That’s exactly what she told me,” Fog’s acerbic comment rolled up to him as he climbed through the hatch, kneeling on the floor beside it and wincing as he rolled right onto a bruise on his calf from Blight’s training staff during testing. “But she wants to see you, you know. So stay alive out there.”

_Stay alive._ No matter the cost, the cunning, the high-wire act of hiding things and protecting something precious to him while living under the fierce scrutiny of a Capitol lens. Maybe Phineas Fog understood more than Haymitch had acknowledged. He’d managed to play a deeper game than Haymitch for so many years. He stuck his head back down the hatch before he closed it, grinned and said, unable to resist getting the last word in, “I don’t know, with that little piece of advice, looks like I might actually be yours too.”

~~~~~~~~~~

The training was almost contemptibly easy for Lyme after an entire childhood of readiness for the arena, and keeping up the training both as a de-stress tactic and a point of pride in the twenty-three years since. She’d passed with flying colors. One more hurdle to vault on the way to the fight. She could respect that, child of the system in Two as she was. Even if she rejected the Capitol’s influence, she could still approve of a system meant to safeguard things, to find and train to an expected level, for the good of all. She might be a rebel, but she was still Two.

Two enough to feel a fierce pride in the idea of going and taking the fight to her home, and striving to set them free. Most of the other districts only saw fanatic loyalists. They didn’t know Two’s heart and soul like she did, and the many tiny fractures and unspoken moments of disapproval. Just because they didn’t scream it on national television didn’t mean they disagreed—look at the Peacekeeper spy network they’d set up, and the effectiveness it had produced to date. More than Thirteen’s guns, more than Katniss Everdeen’s words, more than Johanna Mason’s actually starting the fight.

She would never apologize for where she came from, no matter who looked at her in contempt. It would be a long fight, with divided loyalties, but that was all right. People in Two would relate better to some of their own leading the charge. She was well aware of how lukewarm at best District Two had been towards Katniss. They might listen to her, and Brutus—his disgrace was mostly in his own mind, after all—and even Cashmere and Annie to some degree.

They’d leave a few days after Johanna’s team hopefully caused some chaos in Snow’s camp with their mission and left a better opportunity for her team to exploit. She didn’t have all the details on where they were going, and when, and that was better. Haymitch had told her they were going to get the victors’ families back, that they’d found the kids. But that was enough, just like all she’d told him was that they were going to start the fight in Two. 

She went to go see them off, dressed in their grey uniforms. Rather than the ragged bandanas they’d worn earlier, now they all had red phoenix armbands to match Johanna’s. Brilliant crimson, deep garnet, fiery yellow, bright gold, amber orange—she wore the mingled colors of Six and Two, Three and One and Nine, not Seven’s dark green. She’d left her roots behind, Johanna, and tried to become something more. Lyme could respect that at least, but she hoped the girl hadn’t forgotten who she was and where she came from, at the end of the day. To lose herself in the collective—that had been Haymitch’s tactic. Lacking roots back home, he’d identified with all of them too much, made the victors and all their districts into his family. She’d seen in the Quell how every victor, even those he hadn’t known as well, cut him deeply. Well and good that he could look so far behind himself and the more petty district loyalties, but between that and playing the obedient Capitol toy, he’d scattered his identity so much that she wondered if he ever could feel like he had a home and a place to belong now, if he could live for himself rather than for everyone else.

She reached a hand out to Johanna. “Go get ‘em, huh?” It might not be her kids there, but Chantilly’s were there, and the kids of other people who were her friends, so she hoped like hell the mission succeeded.

“Thanks. Kick some asses in Two.” Apparently her parents were living there now, rescued by the spy network. It would probably explain Johanna’s general mellowing towards Two in recent weeks.

She bid Blight and Clover farewell too—it had never been a particularly close friendship, but she’d always respected them both well enough, especially as she’d seen Blight before he cracked. There was no sign of that now. The man who stood there seemed like the young man of twenty years ago, but with the deep intensity of purpose that happy-go-lucky youthful Blight had lacked. “Good luck,” she told them, well aware for them this mission was utterly personal. A daughter—damn, they’d hidden that away as well as she’d hidden her work with the spies. Good on them.

That left Haymitch for last. Nonchalant as he seemed to be, she’d known him for years. So she could sense that frenzied edge in him that always came up when kids were at risk, that desperate need to succeed and save them. No alcohol here in Thirteen, but if there had been, he might well have been tipping the bottle a bit at this point. As he shook her hand, she caught it in a hard grip, leaned down a little to say lowly in his ear, “This goes wrong, it’s not on you.”

“Noted,” he said dryly. “Tell yourself the same about Two.”

He’d found her weak point there, and she leaned back, not wanting to admit it. He must have seen it on her face, because he smirked slightly. “I always liked that about you, Lyme. You always cared enough to not give a damn if people thought badly of you for it.”

“Are we having a moment?”

“Look after Brute,” he said, nodding casually over to Brutus, talking now to Blight and Clover. “He’s still making sense of it all.” Yeah, she was well aware of his struggles with the sense of betrayal, trying to reconcile a world where everything he had thought safe and secure had been ripped away from him. Probably more so than Haymitch, really, but she humored him by listening. “Got cause to worry that he’ll look for a fight he can’t win out there.”

She smiled at that, shaking her head. “You gave that nice little lecture about making our lives worth all the kids that died in the arena for our survival. I’m pretty sure it’s the most Two I’ve ever heard you think.” Haymitch’s lips twitched up in a momentary half-smile. “If you die well, fighting the good fight to let your friends escape to live another day—that’s one thing. That’s honorable. Even dying to save a friend. But we don’t encourage throwing your life away against stupid odds for nothing.” No wonder Two hadn’t responded well to Katniss or Peeta’s supposed sacrifices: Katniss, volunteering to save a girl who could have just as easily been reaped the next year, and Peeta, trying so hard to die for a girl who’d be a prime target once her chief ally and protector was dead. They’d tried to follow their hearts, but they hadn’t gone about it in a smart way. Still, Two respected bravery, and both those kids had it. “Cash and Annie understand that.” Career as they were, they understood how to step back, assess the odds, and take the smart path. 

“Then you’ll make a good team.” He grinned reluctantly. “So, you and him, huh?” 

She snorted, tried to not retort, _You and her, huh?_ Obvious to anyone with eyes that Johanna and Haymitch were getting closer and closer, though both of them were such defensive bastards it might not have gotten anywhere, plus this place kept a damper on anyone’s romantic life given the lack of privacy.

Hard to explain, but she’d seen Brutus emerge again in training. Unlike that spring, getting ready for the Quell, no doubts, no hesitations—it wasn’t like all the years after the arena too, fighting only for the sake of training and forgetting. This was being alive again. Sparring with him was like it had been all those years ago when they were cadets together, pure joy and keenness of purpose. 

Haymitch wouldn’t understand that. It was a uniquely Two way of thinking, and she’d heard the jokes about flirtation via bruises, about how theirs was a violent kind of romance. Let the other districts keep their flowers and poetry and long walks in the moonlight. They proved themselves in the fight, and showed that they could come together as equals—that what they had was _love_ , a thing freely chosen between two people who could stand on their own, not a pathetic mewling neediness. She’d tested Brutus, back then, and in the intimacy of the fight, she’d read him—his moves, his mood, his hesitations. She’d known him then. But she’d changed, and he hadn’t, and that drove them apart in the end. 

But now…she’d watched him come alive again, become the man he should have been, without cowering behind his own perceived failures to the point he feared anyone’s disapproval. His ferocious honor came from within himself now, an innate gift and certainty in his own judgment, not something he looked to the Capitol to find and approve. 

She’d pushed him up against a tree, that first walk on the surface after she’d seen the change, and kissed him. Every sparring session after that was another test, both of them raising their game and finding pleasure in the ability to match each other. She’d made him work for it, as he had for her, before either of them gave in. But by the time they ended up locked together in the grass up on the surface one afternoon, her teeth fastened in his shoulder to stifle her moans, tasting his skin and his sweat, there was no pretense left. She knew him, learned his moves there as intimately as she did on the sparring mats, and soon enough their dance there was as equally perfect. It was worth regularly having to make excuses to Supply to get a new shirt.

They’d forged that trust anew between them. He would have her back in the war, without question, as she had his. 

She sensed Haymitch watching her, assessing her even in this last moment. His stepfather might be a retired Head from Two, but Haymitch wasn’t Two in his mind. So he didn’t understand her and Brutus exactly, but he didn’t need to have it explained to him either. Still, he fought for what he loved and believed in, just as she did. That was more than Two enough, and that meant there was nothing more that really needed to be said.

So she clasped his forearm in her hand for a moment, feeling his return of the gesture, and stepped aside so that Brutus could bid him goodbye as well. 

All of them lingered for a moment now. This had happened once already, with some of the victors left behind, captured and presumably still alive in the Capitol. Lyme couldn’t easily forget Enobaria, feeling all too acutely like she’d failed Baria again, as she had all those years ago. That first failure opened her eyes to the reality. This second failure did nothing but hurt and fester, and if they didn’t get her back alive, it would never heal. Even if they got Baria back, the scar would be there for whatever she’d endured as a captive of a war where she’d simply been caught in the crossfire of others.

But this was another parting of the ways. She, Cashmere, Brutus, and Annie bound one way, to tackle Two and start the long and arduous process of breaking the Capitol’s back closer in to its heartlands, and Johanna, Haymitch, Blight, and Clover bound another to get the kids back and then harass the Capitol in its food supply and rally the outer districts, and Wiress, Beetee, Chaff, and Chantilly to stay here, doing what good they could here from the home front with tech and intel and whatever else. Chaff and Chantilly seemed to have taken on roles with General Fog as intelligencers—of the two, Chantilly was more the natural, but she had to give Chaff credit for finding the will for it so soon after Snow had murdered so much of his family. Still, for some people loss shattered them, like Haymitch—for others, it galvanized them into action.

For those of them here, it seemed the crucible of war so far had shaped rather than warped them. They’d all stepped up and found strength, removed from the crushing weight of Capitol control—nobody had sat back on their heels in fear. Johanna had become the voice that reached out in a righteous anger to forge unity, Haymitch the fierce will to keep going and make his schemes happen, Blight found his courage and again, Clover her ability to speak up and call a thing out, Cashmere her ability to trust others, Annie the chance to stand strong on her own, and Brutus his honor and pride. As for Lyme herself? She’d found her certainty in the reason she fought, dissatisfaction and quiet treason turned to absolute conviction. 

It had been only a few short months, but already they’d become more than they had been. But chances were, not all of them would make it back alive at war’s end, however it turned out. This might well be the last time she saw some of them, and so she tried to fix them all in her mind’s eye as tightly as she could. She fought for Two’s freedom above all, but they’d become dear to her all the same. If they lost, their next meeting probably would be at an execution. She didn’t intend to die that way, though.

She couldn’t help a smile—a tough fight ahead, that was all the better. Nothing worth fighting for ever came all that easy. _May the odds be ever in our favor. And if not, let’s find a way to turn ‘em around._


	24. Chapter 24

It was like home in some ways—the western reaches of Seven held the same tall spires of the mountains, craggy above the thick coniferous forests below. The chill air, crisp now with the sharp edge of October’s increasingly bitter winds, brought the promise of winter with it already.

But it wasn’t Seven. They were in the vast stretch of borderlands between Two and Nine, the largest blank expanse in Panem on Coin’s map—the Capitol took no chances and according to Plutarch’s analysis, probably had left this territory as a buffer zone between the Capitol and its inner districts, and the outer districts. _Us folk from the poor district rabble,_ Haymitch remarked sarcastically.

They waited—her and Haymitch, Blight and Clover, and three District Thirteen soldiers sent to round out their squad for now. Ranald and Xandra Inkermann, Thirteen natives, brother and sister by the sound of their shared surname and shared looks, both with ink-black hair, near-black eyes and cedar-brown skin deeply spotted with a constellation of darker brown freckles. Their alert and fierce air reminded her of a matched pair of forest cats out on the prowl.

Gentian Deerfield was originally from One, a woman born to the gold mines. Her skin was the deep tea-brown color of Chantilly’s, but for all her being probably fifty-something, the wrinkles looked purely that of age rather than the leathery sun-ageing that was familiar to Johanna from the older folk in Seven. Chances were between the mines and Thirteen, Gentian hadn’t seen the sun that much in her life—and never thought much about it for that matter, given that unlike Johanna every afternoon on surface liberty, the older woman wasn’t staring around her in wonder, drinking in the fresh air and sunlight.

Depressing that a person could be so shut away from all of that to the point where they’d come to not even care at all about it, and while it didn’t freak her out as much as the Capitol’s body alterations, it still struck an odd, uncomfortable note within her.

Gentian was nominally in command as the most senior officer, given her rank as major, but she’d dryly deferred that on the hovercraft ride. “This is your scheme, Abernathy—you and Mason both, so I’m told. So you take point on it.”

By which Johanna understood that Gentian was smart enough to realize when she was out of her depth, trying to set up an ambush for a train in the wilderness, but also wily enough to wash her hands of it a bit so that if the whole thing fucked up, Gentian wouldn’t be held responsible. She wasn’t sure yet whether that made her respect the woman, or look at her with caution.

They’d gotten on site early that morning and seeing the bristling, thick woods immediately they’d turned to her. This was Seven-style terrain, her comfort zone, and even Haymitch listened when she hesitantly started offering ideas regarding the ambush, and eventually Blight chimed in too.

They didn’t need to cut down trees, at least. Both she and Blight were out of practice, and she wasn’t sure she’d put good odds on Haymitch or Clover, let alone the Thirteen women, to be able to handle it. But here in the mountains, with the steep slopes, there was plenty of stone. And fortunately for them too, Gentian had been a blasting captain in the gold mines—whatever that entailed, but it meant she was an ace with explosives and rock. Johanna watched as Haymitch and Gentian discussed the plan to collapse part of the promontory above them and send it down to cover the tracks. Soon enough even Haymitch lost his way, and his nonplussed expression made it clear she’d extended beyond his childhood memories of the mines with the details and terms she used.

Haymitch shrugged apologetically, folding his arms over his chest and looking over at the bluff’s edge. “I worked the mines only a couple weeks when I was a kid, and they didn’t let us near the blasts.” He smirked slightly and added, “No forcefield at the bottom of this cliff either, so it ain’t my strong suit here.”

She readily saw that he was trying to defuse the tension with the self-deprecating snark, and Johanna obliged him, “Well, next time I need an axe bounced at someone, you’re my first choice.”

“Nah, you’re capable of throwing your own axes,” he returned dryly, but there was a spark of enjoyment in his eyes as he said it.

Gentian grumbled and stared at the massive stone face, commenting dubiously, “I know my geology and all, but it takes a touch, a feel for how the stone will cleave. I was used to blasts in an enclosed space…been a good twenty years since I lit up a charge too.” Her round face suddenly looked long and hangdog with the first bits of doubt.

“You can get it done,” Johanna spoke up. Not that she could say she had total faith in Gentian, but hell, someone had to express confidence here. Not like she could do any better either.

It took the better part of the morning, and Gentian and a rotating helper in harness over the cliff edge, delicately drilling out pockets to place the charges and wiring the whole business together. All of them ended up with their feet dangling in the air and nothing but the hard ground and steel rails two hundred feet below. Compared to that, hauling the lines to raise and lower a worker in harness was practically a treat, although by noon they had all discarded their uniform shirts, let alone their jackets, and were working in their undershirts.

But it worked in the end. Gentian pressed the button and with a sharp report, the charges went off, and then came the muffled roar and tumult as the cliff’s edge simply disintegrated, tumbling down the slope in everything from tiny pebbles to boulders the size of a car. Once the dust settled, they peered over the new edge and looked at the tracks below. “It’ll do,” Gentian said with satisfaction.

When the train rounded this particular bend, they’d encounter a thick ten-foot wall of stones and boulders laid right across the track. Even a log or two across the rails would have been enough to derail the train if they hit it at high speed, but something they wouldn’t see wasn’t the point. “We want them to see it and stop the train,” Haymitch had pointed out grimly, “not send the train crashing down the mountain,” pointing down to the valley floor hundreds of feet below.

So now they waited, tense and wary, snacking on some field rations here and there. She ate a handful of freeze-dried strawberries that had probably never seen the sun, and they tasted like lightly sweetened cardboard, and washed them down with a swig of water from the canteen.

If she was nervous simply facing this mission, how the hell Blight and Clover must feel right now was beyond her comprehension. Too much at stake for them personally and yet here they both were, handling the situation as calm and collected as she’d ever seen them. They must have been going out of their minds inside, though. Their daughter was on that train, after all. If she could do them any courtesy it was in giving them as much space as she could at that point. 

She glanced over, seeing them sitting on a log together, heads bowed together in quiet conversation. Blight reached over, his hand brushing Clover’s, grasping her fingers in his and bringing his hand to her lips, kissing it lightly, then keeping hold, eyes on his wife’s, only for her. Johanna looked away quickly, feeling a curious stab of emotion—something that felt almost like pain initially, but then simple a raw-edged emptiness. She looked away quickly, having intruded on something not meant for her, and reached into the foil pouch for more of the crappy strawberries.

She’d waited in ambush back in that garden arena. Set up and waited, and the waiting was no easier now than it had been back then. It seemed to stretch on interminably, giving her nothing but time to think and worry and doubt, but she did her best to keep an iron barrier between her and all that. If she let it in it could turn to fear, and she wasn’t going to be that frail girl anymore, caught in the claws of the monster that was her own mind. She wouldn’t end up paralyzed and helpless—never again.

Haymitch sat down beside her on the needle-strewn ground with a small grunt of relief, stretching out his legs. “Exhausted after a couple hours of hard work,” she mocked him lightly, “you’d never have lasted at the lumber camps.”

He looked over at her, cocked an eyebrow and replied, “You look plenty wrung out yourself.”

She’d gotten soft away from the camps—that much was true. Even the intensive military training wasn’t the same kind of punishing test that hours and hours of hard physical labor had been for her as a young teenager at the camps. 

But the physical training, and the reduced rations, had steadily carved away at the surplus flesh. She was stressed out enough that she’d have been eating, but that wasn’t available to her. She’d had to try to find a way to get it out of her system in training and in the peace of her surface walks, but she’d felt her temper on hair trigger because of how tightly everything was controlled, denied her coping mechanisms of choice. They refused to issue her new clothing so that meant just tightening her belt, though her shirt felt comfortably roomy now rather than fitted. At least she’d managed to beg them to give her a couple of new bras since the ones they’d issued were useless. 

She glanced over at him, his uniform shirt unbuttoned and untucked still. He hadn’t lost all his extra pounds, a little softness at his waist yet pushing out against his belt, but he’d lost weight as well, his own clothes hanging looser around his body. Plus he didn’t have access to the booze—so he’d had to find new ways of dealing with things as well. 

She didn’t want to give Thirteen credit for anything, strict bastards that they were, and how they’d forced all this. But reluctantly she had to admit they’d both maybe needed a kick in the ass of some sort, and well-meaning as their fellow victors might be, she wouldn’t have listened to them. She’d have pushed them away with a sharp retort that they had no right to speak, no right to condemn, because while they might have some inkling, they hadn’t endured everything that she had.

What a bitch she’d been, really. True, she had a right to be angry, but she’d made her bitterness and fury both her crutch and her club, lashing out at everyone. Things of late had given her a good hard slap of reality. The other victors had lost so much too—murdered families, children kidnapped, friends and loved ones held captive and maybe killed in that prison—suffering that equaled hers, or worse. And every single day, ordinary people all across Panem were fighting and dying and suffering loss in this war. Maybe they were buying something with their lives rather than simply being chewed up and spit out by a lousy system, but it was a price paid and a loss to the ones left behind regardless.

If anger was her weapon, at least she’d refined and purified it into a form of passion—it was a keen-edged axe now rather than a crude bludgeon. Rather than wielding it on anyone who got near her, she’d turn it on the ones who deserved it: Snow and his cronies who’d kept the whole sick system running. She could say what they’d all been thinking. _This has always been wrong, what you’ve taken from us is wrong, and we’re not going to take it anymore._ More than the lost weight, it felt good having a renewed sense of certainty and something like purpose. 

She wasn’t sure she’d go so far as feeling readily that her mom and dad could look at her with pride, given what she’d done in years past, but that letter had touched something in her that had long felt withered and dead. They loved her still. They believed in her. Her fellow victors now looked at her too as if she had some kind of worth to them, as if she was someone they could trust and befriend, rather than tolerating her only due to a shared status. The love in her parents’ words and the hope to see her again, the half-smile and look of approval and something approaching pride on Haymitch’s face, Cashmere’s acceptance, Annie’s kindness, Blight’s earnestness and how easily they’d started to work in tandem now— those that knew her looked at her like she was someone they valued and cared about now. All of that meant more to her than Plutarch’s cameras and the nation calling her the Phoenix.

So maybe she had a little something to prove to them here and now too. It wasn’t her kids held captive. She wasn’t Haymitch either, to so readily throw herself into the fire simply on the off-chance of rescue. But it was the right thing to do. No more hostages for Snow, no more innocents hurt on the whims of cruel bastards. They were the kids of people she had come to appreciate anew over the last weeks—Chaff and his staying as strong as he could despite his entire foundation crumbling, Cecelia missing in the Capitol’s custody. She owed it to them to use what strength she had to help look out for them and theirs. No more insisting she could only trust herself and to hell with the rest of them. It was no way to live—no way to die either.

She touched the axes hanging at her belt. She might have passed the marksmanship portion of the training and could handle that rifle now rather than gawking cluelessly at it as she had back in the Southlands slaughterhouse, but she still trusted far more to the hatchets instinctively. The rational part of her understood that the long-distance weapons would be of use too, particularly in this war, but she’d seen how defenseless Katniss was close in, how easily she’d fallen to the wolf-mutts once they were inside her arrow range and she was down on the ground. She’d feel far more naked and defenseless without the hatchets than the rifle. Eyeing the hilt of the knives hanging from Haymitch’s belt, well aware that he had a handful of small throwing knives as well, obviously he felt the same—and Blight’s lumber axe was strapped across his back, and Clover likewise had her paired sickles. They might have been trained as Thirteen soldiers, but they couldn’t think that way. They’d been formed in a far different crucible. Besides, the close-quarters weapons would be far better for work on this train.

Suddenly Gentian’s easy crouch, tending to her pistol, turned into the wary tense air of readiness. “Inbound!” she called, and like that, all of them readied. She slipped the hatchets loose from their holding straps, feeling their solid reassuring weight in her hands.

She watched as the train—not the sleek silver bullet train victors always took to the Capitol, but an older, boxier cargo train like the ones that hauled lumber away from the winter town—slowly ground to a halt in front of the barrier. “They gonna be ready for company?” Clover asked her dubiously, pushing up off the ground and standing, staying hidden from the train’s view, flexing her wrists with sickles in hand.

“It should have looked like just another avalanche,” Blight said softly.

“I’d be ready for anything,” Haymitch said dubiously. “But at least we’ve got a couple people on the inside…”

Just as he said that, the crack-pop of a gun going off inside the train reached her ears, and with that, she decided either their allies on the train had gotten a start to things or else someone got suspicious and started firing shots with orders to make sure the kids weren’t taken alive, so either way, there was no time to waste. “On it,” she called, sprinting towards the front of the train. Without knowing where the kids were on the train, they’d agreed that she, Haymitch, and the Inkermanns would start up there, and make sure to take the conductor out while they were at it unless they surrendered, while Blight, Clover, and Gentian headed for the back of the train and worked their way forward. A tiny radio-piece, clipped to one shoulder of her bulletproof vest as it was for all of them, would let her know if that team got to the kids first.

She ran, certain in the knowledge that Haymitch was right there with her and would fight alongside her, and willing to at least somewhat trust that Xandra and Ranald had their backs if it came down to it. With his longer legs, he reached the door a couple seconds ahead of her, jerking it open and barely pausing as he grabbed the railing and vaulted up into the car, turning towards the front of the train and demanding, “Stand down now.” 

By the time she got up the steps too, she looked forward and saw the conductor already down, the black steel of the tiny, hiltless throwing knife buried in his chest that Haymitch retrieved even as she watched, and his throat cut for certainty with one brutally efficient stroke. Glancing at the radio that hadn’t been switched on yet, the dead man’s hand clutched around the cord, she breathed a sigh of relief. Better that the man was dead—even if he was probably from Six like most train conductors, they couldn’t chance it today. He’d had his chance to surrender, or to join them, and he hadn’t. They couldn’t depend on everyone in all the districts being all about the rebellion, could they? There just wasn't time to talk everyone around to it.

Sparing only that momentary glance, she turned back, ready for the Peacekeeper already charging at her, with his rifle raised. But in the close confines of the car, finding the room to effectively use it without banging it on the seats was no easy task, and her throwing axe stopped him dead in his tracks—literally. That was why Thirteen had issued them with pistols instead of rifles for this particular job, though Gentian, Ranald, and Xandra had rifles to cover their retreat if need be.

The sound of bullets filled the air further back and she couldn’t tell if it was their side or the Peacekeepers. All she could do was keep on fighting, keep grimly wading her way through their enemy and looking for any sight of the children carried aboard this train, praying that Snow hadn’t issued an order to murder them at the slightest sign of resistance. But unlike the conductor, the Peacekeepers were all wearing their body armor, so that made going in for the kill harder. She aimed for faces, chopped at thighs and necks, a whirling unstoppable force, pushing ever onward.

At least their Peacekeeper allies were smart enough to quickly mark their body armor with red marker or paint once the attack began—with her blood up and battle instincts kicking, she was ready to attack anyone in a white jacket. But she saw one dead man with a red cross on his breastplate along the way. Whether his hair, greying but still thick, was genuinely red or blood-stained from the bullet hole through his temple, she couldn’t tell. His wide-staring eyes seemed to follow her even as she hurriedly hopped over him, trying to not slip in the puddle of blood. The thick coppery scent of blood was in the air, though nowhere near as bad as it had been in Southlands. Haymitch ought to be able to get through it without much trouble.

A silence fell, and Clover radioed, voice thick with both triumph and tears, that the kids were in the third car from the back and they had three more friendly Peacekeepers with them. Johanna could hear the other woman’s voice in the next car back, and the chorus of high, youthful voices, cries and confusion. Gentian went ahead at that.

Working her way through that last car, there were more dead Peacekeepers, red-marked and otherwise—what had happened here? Had someone suspected something with the train coming to a halt, and their allies hurried to the attack, at the cost of their own lives? She looked, confused and without any answers, seeing only the carnage there. It looked even worse than a Cornucopia bloodbath.

Then Haymitch let out a gasp that sounded like pain, and she whirled on her heel, afraid that he’d been hit somehow and hid it. But the blood on him apparently wasn’t his, as he nimbly moved past her, dropping down beside another Peacekeeper. One slumped between two rows of seats, the blue upholstery beneath her dyed a deep, saturated burgundy from the slow but steady gush of blood from her right thigh, torn to shreds by someone’s bullet.

“Is she with…” Johanna began, wanting to warn him to be careful, not readily seeing any red on the woman’s armor, or a red armband or anything. The only red on her was the sodden scarlet, formerly white, of her trouser leg. But it was a bad angle, the woman’s body twisted and half-turned onto her stomach.

“She’s ours,” Haymitch said, and there was some strange tone she’d never heard before in his voice, some unnerving absence of feeling that she didn’t yet have the full knowledge of him to read and fill in the blank.

Then he carefully helped turn her over, exposing the half-hidden face and the red mark on her breastplate. Johanna looked and saw the wavy black hair, and the skin that without the bloodless pallor would be the same warm olive tone as Haymitch’s. Couldn’t see the color of the closed, strangely sunken-looking eyes, but she didn’t need to see. She still couldn’t say exactly _who_ the woman was, but this wasn’t the time to demand information. Unfortunately, Haymitch crouched in the aisle beside the dying woman and blocked her path, so she was a trapped witness to this whether she liked it or not. 

She reached for her medic pouch, but then looked again, seeing that Haymitch’s stayed clipped at his own side. She may have only had the cursory medical training for field treatment to stabilize someone until they could get to a doctor, but it was enough to form judgments. Looking at the gory mess of the leg and the blood already spilled, it was hopeless. The wound gushed steadily still, must have clipped an artery. The Peacekeeper woman had lost too much blood, sunk too deeply into shock. All that was left was for this to reach its inevitable conclusion.

Standing back and keeping silent, she watched as Haymitch reached out and grasped the woman’s hand. “Briar,” he said, voice now thick with pain and confusion, like a lost child hoping for someone to somehow make it all better. “No…Apollonia,” and his voice was steadier at that. _Briar._ Oh, shit—this was his girlfriend from long ago, the one that his father had rescued along with this mother. She didn’t remember the face from the photograph Snow had showed her, but Haymitch had no doubt. He’d mentioned that she’d married, moved on and all, and that he was happy for that, but he hadn’t told her the woman would be on this train. Had he known? When he saw her, he seemed stunned rather than shocked. He must have known. She wasn’t sure whether she should look away or not, but couldn’t seem to do it. It felt like someone should bear witness to this.

The voice that came from Apollonia was tired and soft, almost too quiet to catch. She wasted none of her remaining strength on lengthy words, didn’t even open her eyes. She must have recognized the voice—but then, she’d heard him on television over the years, heard how his voice had changed from the boy she’d loved when she was a teenager. “Rube?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” Haymitch answered, still holding her hand in his, voice as gentle as Johanna had ever heard from him. It may have been over twenty years, but he’d loved Apollonia, and whatever he felt in that moment, he obviously managed to bury in order to make these final moments the best he could. “I wish it was...if I could…” The familiar look of guilt and regret twisting his features hurt for her to see. She’d seen it half-hidden every time he dealt with a dead tribute, but it stood there, clear as day. She could almost finish the sentence: _If it could be me instead, I’d make the trade._ Now she did look away, feeling too much like an intruder.

“Look after ‘em, Hay,” she managed. That was it. She never said another word, and Johanna heard the faint death-rattle what felt like only seconds later as Apollonia’s lungs stopped the struggle and her body relaxed in death. If he’d hoped for some kind of reassuring farewell to cherish, some absolution or kind word, it wasn’t going to happen. But Johanna had seen too many people die in her years, in the woods and the Games and the war, to be full aware that the dramatic goodbyes in Capitol movies were just so much bullshit. Death was rarely serene. This one hadn’t been.

Haymitch stood, and looked down at Apollonia, just for a moment, and she could almost see him composing himself, steeling his nerves and his heart once again. “Come on, let’s get on with it,” he said quietly, and it took Johanna a moment to realize he was talking to her, that he hadn’t forgotten she was there. Or maybe he was talking to himself at the same time.

She shouldn’t ask, but she couldn’t help it. The word slipped out. “Rube?”

“Her husband,” he said curtly, stepping over a body in the aisle, hands braced on a row of seats. “He was the redhead back in the first car.” Damn. Maybe Haymitch should have lied to her. Then again, maybe it was a comfort to the woman in those final moments to know that she and her husband would be reunited very shortly. 

They moved through the eerie silence of the death-car, towards the door leading to the kids. She saw that her boots tracked bloody footprints as they moved onto a clean section of carpet. She grabbed Haymitch’s arm before she flung open the door. “Wipe your boots,” she said gesturing down. The last thing the kids needed, after having already watched their families die, and being dragged around as Capitol prisoners, was for their would-be rescuers to come from that charnel-house looking and smelling like death.

He glanced down. “Never pegged you as one for high-class manners,” he said. But the fact that he could even try to joke gave her some heart. Struggling with it as he must be, he was trying.

Cleaning their boots and hastily scrubbing some of the spatters of blood off of them, mostly clean, Haymitch touched his radio. “All clear forward of you, no surviving prisoners or allies,” he reported to them, voice steady and face now composed as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “We’re on our way.”

She opened the door and stepped through, and saw the kids crowded into the back—everybody from a boy poised on the edge of adolescence down to toddlers, all the skin and hair colors of the various districts. There were Chantilly’s kids, brown-haired and green-eyed. Chaff’s daughter, hugging herself and looking off into the distance at something none of them could see. Clover crouched down and had a little girl clinging to her like a squirrel, one with her golden brown hair. Blight stood there with her, obviously uncertain what to do just yet. The Thirteen women stood together in a cluster of grey uniforms, looking over the small knot of kids and conferring.

Her eyes went to the one child in the group with deep brown hair and golden skin, the large, wide-set eyes. She looked so confused, and even at only three, Lindy’s features looked so much like Rhus that it hit her in the heart like an arrow in a way that even watching the broadcast of the executions hadn’t, because she’d been so focused on dealing with her own shit from the arena and the demands of starting the war and trying to become the Phoenix. Looking at the daughter of the boy she’d loved, the last remaining scrap of him, now the other shoe finally dropped it made it inexorable. _He’s gone. They’re all gone._

“Vick,” Haymitch said from behind Johanna, stepping forward.

“Mister Abernathy, sir,” the boy holding Lindy’s hand answered self-consciously, wary as if he wasn’t exactly sure what would happen now. He was only eleven at best if he hadn’t been murdered in the replacement Quell—maybe twelve now, true, but he looked so little she wouldn’t have pegged him even for eleven. The black hair, olive skin, and thoughtful grey eyes behind the glasses with one cracked lens told her that he was from Twelve, as much as Haymitch’s familiarity with him did. The kids of Briar’s sister, wasn’t that it? She couldn’t remember the last name.

Suddenly something tackled her and she almost reached for her hatchet again, but she glanced down and saw that it was a little girl, black hair in a wild tangle, clinging to her legs.

It was instinct that led her to crouch down, and the girl grabbed on even tighter, and Johanna wrapped her arms around the girl, tried hard to not think cynical thoughts that the kid must not recognize her if she imagined Johanna Mason was the place to turn for comfort. Nobody reached out to touch her, and yet, here this child was, desperate and alone, and she couldn’t find it in herself to push the kid away and tell her to find someone better. “Posy’s never had a pa,” Haymitch said softly, watching her, “so it makes sense she’d turn to another woman.” And Clover was understandably absorbed in her own daughter, and Gentian and Xandra both looked at the kids with a dispassionate view like they were an objective accomplished, not a bunch of terrified and traumatized children. Posy must have seen something on Johanna’s face that made her hope and mustered the resolve to approach someone for that comfort, even a stranger, even one that older children were smart enough to hold terror of thanks to the Capitol broadcasts. Shit. The kid had more courage than Johanna ever had.

Vick looked at Haymitch, and at Lindy still clutching his hand, with an agonized confusion on his features—trying so hard to be grown up, but he was a child still, a child’s slender body and thin shoulders and soft features. “What happens now?” he asked softly, and that too was a child’s voice, high and piping, but those solemn grey eyes looked ages beyond his years. He held Lindy’s hand tightly, and from how the toddler responded to him, pressing herself tightly into his side, shyly avoiding looking at anyone else, she imagined he’d been the leader for the kids during their captivity. She could see how they all glanced at him, how he was the one who spoke up. Eleven years old and shouldering a burden like that—she’d seen well enough that innocence couldn’t be restored. 

Posy clung to her like a squirrel on a tree trunk, tiny fingers knotted tightly in the straps of Johanna’s body armor. But despite the tears running down her face, she was eerily silent. Johanna had the notion that perhaps her guards had taught her not to cry, and wanted to go put another bullet in them for good measure. _What now, indeed._

“I want Ma,” Posy sobbed quietly, and Johanna’s heart wrenched at the sound of it. She’d been ten years older than this girl when inside she was crying the very same words in the arena, and the year later, in all those Capitol beds. 

Sometimes all a person could do was sit there, and hug. “We’re getting you out of here, now,” she answered Vick’s question. What happened after that, she hadn’t the first clue, but it was an easy call for right now. Get the hell out before the Capitol became aware, and get the kids to safety back in Thirteen. She scooped Posy up in her arms. Haymitch reached for Lindy, and Vick nodded as if to tell her it would be OK. The oldest kids helped the younger, and they walked back, out of the train car and off the platform leading to the next car back. Not knowing most of them by sight, she counted them surreptitiously—twenty-eight kids, so all alive and accounted for. If there was any mercy in this whole shitty business, it was that they’d all survived.

Ranald radioed for the hovercraft, and it cast off its cloaking, appearing in a shimmer above them, lowering down to open the hatch and drop the ramp. It was the work of a few minutes to get the kids all aboard, though it took longer strapping them in to harnesses made for adults as the hovercraft hastily made for home—Thirteen didn’t believe in joyrides, after all, the only people they sent out were soldiers—was no easy task. Still, between excess straps and some carabiners and the like, Blight took charge and managed to quickly jury-rig the harnesses—she could see the old skills of securing logs and lumber in his steady hands. She only hoped they didn’t run into any kind of a rough ride between here and Thirteen.

She noticed Haymitch crouching down in front of Chaff’s daughter, a dark-skinned and pretty girl of about eight, a bottle in hand. “Here,” he said, pressing something into her open palm.

“What’s this?” the girl asked, soft-voiced, her Eleven accent thick as the air of a humid August night. 

“Sleeping pill,” Haymitch told her. “Best thing to do now is get some rest, hey?”

“You’re my daddy’s friend, Mister Haymitch,” Farrow said in barely more than a whisper. “But Mommy doesn’t like when he talks about you or his other friends away from home.”

To his credit, Haymitch absorbed that without a flinch. “Your pa sent me, Farrow. And you’ll be with him soon enough. But you should get some rest,” he repeated.

Farrow swallowed it, eyes never leaving Haymitch’s face as if still wondering whether or not to fully trust him. Shattered innocence again, and it made Johanna want to lash out, take it out in blood. But instead she forced herself to calm down. The last thing they probably needed to see was someone pissed off and raging. So she silently stepped forward and held her hand out, and Haymitch poured some of the glistening dark red capsules into her palm.

They worked their way through all the kids, some eager, some reluctant. Even Blight and Clover seemed to tacitly accept that the best thing for Amitra—those wide-set hazel eyes, Blight’s eyes looking right back at her—and her cousins. By the time Vick took his, fiercely determined to be the last to go to sleep, holding Posy’s hand, Farrow’s eyes were already drooping.

It was good thinking on his part. The kindest thing he could give them was a few hours of dreamless sleep after the nightmare they’d endured. “How did you get a whole bottle of those sleeping pills?” she asked him quietly as they shut the door and headed up to the mess. Ah, memories—the last time they’d sat like this, he’d been talking her into this whole insanity of becoming the face and voice of the rebellion.

“Took it from the infirmary shelf when Harcourt wasn’t looking right before we left,” he said with a faint shrug of his shoulders. “I’m sure Coin will be pissed.” His tone made it crystal clear how little he gave a shit about that, and where his priorities stood.

She couldn’t resist a smile at that. “Rebellion’s going to your head, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, well, we both know I’ve never been very good at coloring inside the lines,” he returned, and for a moment, there was a spark of enjoyment in his eyes at the banter as he slid into the seat at the table. But it cooled quickly as the weight of it all seemed to settle back on him.

“Almost all of them hopefully have families to take them in, whether they’re with us or Snow’s got them. But those two…Vick and Posy, they have anybody back in Twelve?”

Haymitch shook his head. “Jonas’ sister Lorna died young,” and from his tone there was a story there that he didn’t relish recalling. “Hazelle’s sister…Briar. Well. We both know how that turned out. She and her husband were going to take the kids, she wrote me that with the letter my pa brought, but…” He blew out his breath in a soft sigh that might have been intended to cover a hitching sound from emotion. “So no. They have nobody.”

“Lindy either,” she said, glumly realizing it. Katrin had been an orphan, as she heard it, a good reason why she’d ended up working the trash pine crews. Rhus’ parents were both dead, and all his siblings had died as babies. “So what are you going to do with them?”

Why the hell she badgered him about it, she didn’t know exactly. But it had to be that if he had some answer about his two kids from Twelve, it would help her figure out what to do with Lindy, help her forget that tiny face and those familiar eyes. That frightened expression, wanting some kind of answer, some kind of security, and not finding it, clinging to the familiarity of the closest thing she’d had to an adult throughout—an eleven-year-old boy. She also tried to not think about the feel of Posy clinging to her either, the desperate strength in that tiny body, tried to not imagine that little girl screaming with nightmares.

Johanna of mere months ago would have laughed and said snarkily, _If you think there’s any kind of safety in this world, you’re a fucking moron. The only thing you can rely upon is that nothing lasts and chances are everyone will fail you in the end._ Johanna of mere months ago had been a colossal bitch in her own fear and pain and frustration, not caring who she hurt, even a little kid.

Now Haymitch had that all-too-blank look on his face—the one that was more like a carved wooden mask with the careful absence of anything than any kind of serenity, the look she associated with him having a drink in hand and doing his best to demolish it at a steady, rapid pace. “I can’t send them back to Twelve,” he answered her, “they’ve got no kin left there—they’ll get thrown right into the community home. I suppose someone in Thirteen would take them, but…growing up like that, all rules and orders and being a good little obedient worker-bee…”

He shook his head, rubbing his eyes tiredly, “Briar never had kids, Jonas and Burt died down in the mines five years back now, Hazelle died in the executions with Perulla. Gale, executed, Rory and Primrose died in that replacement Quell—and Katniss, well, we both know what happened to her. They were my friends, and Vick and Posy are all that’s left of them. And I’m the only one that’s left. I owe it to them.”

By “them”, she wasn’t sure whether he meant Vick and Posy Hawthorne, or all the dead that he carried with him still. She might not claim to be all that familiar with Twelve’s ways, but she’d always known that when he said he owed something, it was a debt that carried all the weight and force of personal and cultural honor behind it and there was no talking him out of it. “Taking on two little kids isn’t a damn hobby, Haymitch—seriously, do you even know what the hell you’re doing?”

“Not really, but it’s not about me.” That self-deprecating look came over him, “And yeah, given my _stellar_ record of keeping kids alive, let alone happy and sane, anyone with any sense wouldn’t leave any kid in my care if there was any better option—but there’s not. At least they won’t be raised as just two more orphans among dozens, and they’ll have someone who’ll let them be Twelve, tell them where they came from, who their parents were—I can give them that much. Besides…I should have done better for Hazelle long ago, back when there were four kids I could have helped.” Yeah, she remembered him telling her about how he’d almost offered to marry the newly widowed Hazelle Hawthorne out of that damn sense of honor, and she could see how in his mind, this was atoning for what he felt he couldn’t safely offer these kids then. But he was given to throwing himself wholeheartedly into things and figuring it out along the way—she could only hope that this wasn’t the one time that he couldn’t keep a few steps ahead.

When he got like this, ready to throw himself right in the fire without hesitation, without concern for how he might break himself by it, she couldn’t help but get pissed off at him. It was anger, not fear, or so she told herself.

Besides, anger helped stave off thoughts of what would happen to Lindy, though they now intruded on her mind—a little girl even younger than Posy. The last living scrap that remained of her own childhood friends: Rhus, Bud, and Holly. Did poor Lindy even remember her father, let alone her mother? She’d extended that last tiny bit of trust as Johanna gave her the sleeping pill and murmured some kind of stupid soothing nonsense, and she’d clutched at Johanna’s hand for a moment, unwilling to let go. Quiet, so quiet in her fear, not like the lively, happy little girl who was all smiles that Johanna had given a stick of candy only last winter, the girl held in the arms of an equally laughing and happy Rhus. She couldn’t give Lindy peppermint candy now, couldn’t give her back her father. All she could give was a sleeping pill.

But was that it? She looked at Haymitch in that moment and hated him a little, because by jumping to it so readily, so decisively, so fucking _impulsively_ , he set an impossible example. She couldn’t sign Lindy over to the community home without feeling like a selfish failure. She’d never be able to forget that pleading look. She couldn’t…it wasn’t that she didn’t care, that Lindy didn’t pull at some part of her deeply, it was that she could fail so damn badly, and kids were so fragile, they needed kindness, not someone who barely could stand to not turn the rough edge on everything instinctively. 

Fucking Haymitch and his impossible Twelve honor. He admitted he could probably screw it up and still did it anyway, singleminded as anything. She couldn’t let a forty-one-year-old recovering alcoholic and an eleven-year-old boy show that they were braver than her. The fucking Phoenix, leading by example, right? “I’ll keep Lindy,” she said, voice steadier than she’d imagined. Something to lose now, someone she could fail. She’d escorted tributes to their deaths. She’d hurt Rhus to push him away. With Lindy, she’d have to do better, be better. She couldn’t let Lindy down by pushing her away, but the fear that she’d do just as bad by fumbling through it burned deep within her nonetheless. Being a mother? Fuck, she’d never even been a wife. But still, Lindy could have been hers, in the life of a different Johanna. She could have married Rhus after Katrin died too, and Lindy would have been hers then, wouldn’t she? “I…can’t abandon her.” Just like that, like on Reaping Day long ago, her life suddenly veered onto a new course and she could never be the same again. _What the hell am I doing?_ The only thing she could, it seemed—the right thing. It still seemed unreal.

He didn’t judge, didn’t question her, and to Johanna’s relief, he didn’t make a big production about telling her what a great thing she was doing. _Tell me we’re not gonna screw them up._ Maybe she’d said it aloud, because suddenly she felt the touch of his hand on hers. She looked up and saw the same uncertainty and determination in his eyes that she felt, and that was actually a relief. “I know.”


	25. Chapter 25

The hovercraft ride back to Thirteen stretched on for Haymitch, given that he kept company mostly with his own thoughts. Gentian and the Inkermanns had dropped off to sleep easily enough, faces smooth and untroubled with the rest of those for whom it was simply a mission accomplished, and one admirably bloodless on their part. The worst they could claim was Ranald being clipped in the arm by a bullet, because the fight was well underway by the time he swung up into that train. The cost in lives came to the Peacekeepers, not their team. 

As for the Peacekeepers—well, they kept to themselves too, a small depleted huddle who’d lost most of their number. He had to know, though, despite his reluctant to intrude on their grief and shock. “What happened?” he asked the oldest of them, a man probably a few years older than him.

Tired eyes the dusty grey-green of sage looked back at him, remarkably bright against deep, lustrously black-blue skin. His uniform was still freckled with blood. “Frayne—the commander, he thought something might be up with the barricade. I don’t know if he had higher-up orders to it or not, he was in such a frenzy I don’t think he did, but he told us to grab the kids and start shooting. The kids weren’t much use to the Capitol anyway any longer except as future cadets, so better to kill ‘em all than risk the rebels getting a publicity coup from their rescue.” He blew out his breath in a deep sigh, seeming to sag beneath it like a slowly leaking sack of flour. “Some folks in the compartment forward obviously took exception and started the fight then and there.”

He wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that was Briar who’d started it, rallying fiercely to give her only surviving nephew and niece even a small chance of survival, at the cost of her own life. Maybe it had been. Maybe it hadn’t. Nobody survived in that train car so he would never know, would he? He nodded to the Peacekeeper. “Thanks. Get some rest, hey…” He realized he hadn’t heard the man’s name.

“Drusus Law,” though the man’s eyes were already sliding shut.

With that, Haymitch looked around one more time. Blight and Clover talked quietly, obviously wrapped up in their own plans. So he headed back to the galley, sensing he’d find Johanna there.

Coffee, cigarettes—most of all, alcohol, but none of those coping mechanisms were available, so all he could do was buckle down and try to shoulder the burden of it as best as he could. Briar was dead and he’d sworn to her to take on Vick and Posy, because what else could he do? He was sick of promises made to people on the verge of dying, all the way back to Maysilee Donner and that damn mockingjay pin which he now wore on the inside of his rucksack as a reminder. But the weight of his word held him, steady and strong as any steel-forged chain.

He sat down heavily across from Johanna. “You look like you need a drink,” she said, eyeing him.

“Yeah,” he agreed tiredly, sitting back in the seat and craving nothing more than oblivion of some sort. It seemed like an incredible fucking joke. Briar alive, Briar well and hopeful to see him again, and then right after he saw her, she died. Well, at least this time he’d been there to hold her hand. But this time she wouldn’t be buried like whatever dead body Fog had burned up in that Seam house. He didn’t pretend that the Capitol would bury a treasonous Peacekeeper with honor, so she’d be left on that train for decay or scavengers or both to find her, and that thought grieved him. She’d deserved better. She always had.

Johanna was saying something, and he forced himself out of the dark warrens of his own mind to listen, opening his eyes. “I know that look on you. Quit it,” Johanna told him, staring at him with that fierce intensity of hers, that glower as if she’d attack him if he crossed her. “She was, what, forty?”

“Almost forty-two.” She’d been three months older than him.

“She was forty-one. She had a husband—“

“You think I don’t know that?” he said, temper exploding to life. “Fuck’s sake! The first word out of her mouth to me is to ask about her husband, and after hearing he’s dead, the second is to tell me to look after the kids since they’d have nobody else with both her and Rube dead. You imagine this is about me cherishing some stupid hope that we’d have something again, her and me?” He’d never imagined that since her letter, since that picture of her beaming standing next to the man she’d chosen, the words that quietly but firmly told him that she’d long ago moved past him and that she hoped he wasn’t still burning for her. Besides, he wasn’t nearly stupid enough to believe there was a miner’s fart of a chance that she still cherished him so deeply. They’d both changed so much from that long-ago spring and they could never go back to then, and what he’d become since wasn’t exactly the dream lover of any sane, rational woman.

“My point is she wasn’t an innocent teenage girl, Haymitch, who died just because she loved you. This time, she chose her own path. She chose to fight, knowing she could die. It’s not always all about you, old man, and who you can and can’t help or save. Briar chose to try to protect those kids and stand up for something she believed in. Hell, Katniss chose to volunteer for her sister and to pull out those berries and risk what the Capitol would do to her for it. If I get killed out there, it’d because _I choose_ to fight, not because you twisted my arm into it, or because you weren’t there to protect me.” She looked at him, chin tipped up at a proud angle, eyes daring him to argue. “We’re not helpless children. You’re not some lofty god able to be responsible for everything and we’re not all your victims or your puppets,” Johanna insisted. “If you respect other people at all, damn well better give us some credit for our own choices.”

He couldn’t resist smiling at her with a weak, wry expression. “Charming as ever.”

“So tell me I’m wrong,” she challenged him, body tense as a taut-strung wire, ready for the fight.

“You’re not.” He had to admit that much. “But don’t you think you get to tell me how I can feel about this, dammit. She was my friend, all right?” Her letter had seemed hopeful of that much.

“I’m not,” she said cautiously. “Just…there’s mourning someone and there’s massacring yourself over it.”

“And you’d know that so well, darlin’,” he observed dryly, leaning back in the seat and looking at her, issuing a silent challenge of his own for her to try to deny it, to hide it behind whatever cloud of sarcastic bullshit that had become routine defense for them both. Trying to pretend that nothing mattered to cover the dark, raw-edged places where everything vital and good had been ripped out of them, and only themselves to blame for it—or so it seemed.

“You know I do,” she returned neatly, brave enough to admit it.

He sighed, rubbing his tired eyes with his fingertips. “Any other helpful and inspiring life advice to beat into me, dear Phoenix?”

“Any helpful and inspiring life advice about how to deal with a three-year-old?”

“People didn’t want me around kids,” he told her dryly. “I’m fresh out of parenting advice.” Though at least with Chantilly and Chaff there, they might fumble their way through it well enough. He had no idea what this might turn into. Maybe in the future someone better would come along, and he could give the kids over to them secure in the knowledge they’d do far better by them, but for now, it seemed like there could be no other way.

His mind easily recreated the picture of the kids down in the compartment before they left them to their rest. Vick slept, his arm draped around an equally asleep Posy’s shoulders, drawing her in towards him as well as could be done with them both buckled into their seats. He’d looked at the boy, picturing how the other children had looked to him and that expression of determination. For most of his years, Vick had been a baby brother, the youngest of three sons, and certainly Gale and Rory had taken up the job of defending and guiding him and Posy both and being the man of the family. But the last months had been a harsh lesson in growing up far too young, and the awesome weight of responsibility, and Vick seemed to have stepped up to that burden and taken it all.

He was reminded of himself in that awesomely heavy burden of responsibility taken on too young, though Vick’s quiet thoughtfulness and that boyish frame reminded him painfully of Ash as well—Ash, the last time Haymitch had seen him, not quite twelve himself—but he could see Hazelle in that face all too easily, and from Hazelle inevitably stemmed thoughts of Briar.

Fog talked about the human wreckage of the last war, all those orphaned kids who’d either been stuffed in the community home or even worse, ripped from their homes and sent somewhere else because they were young enough to not remember—and here, staring through the glass at the sleeping kids returning to shattered lives, he could see it plain in a way he couldn’t hearing it from the lips of an eighty-year-old man who long ago had accepted that fate and made the best of it. He couldn’t hand the kids over to Thirteen to only be accepted if they could be forced entirely from their Twelve roots and be reshaped in Thirteen’s ways, couldn’t send them back to Twelve to the cold lovelessness of the community home where they’d never be anything but inconvenient survivors of destroyed families.

The guilt gnawed at him—if not for him and his meddling, Vick and Posy would have their brothers and their mother, Peeta would have his family—for whatever that was worth—and perhaps Katniss would even have survived. Alive, but inheriting what world? _You’re not a damn god able to be responsible for everything and we’re not all your victims,_ Johanna insisted. _If you respect other people at all, damn well better give us some credit for our own choices._

He had to admit she had a point, but like the Games, these children hadn’t asked for any of this, hadn’t asked to suffer for the actions of the adults around them. _What am I doing? The only thing I can do._

True, he’d taken on some responsibility for both Katniss and Peeta, given their fucked-up families, but it was still a distant, formal responsibility. They came to him with problems about the Capitol, not life issues. A middle-aged unmarried drunk who couldn’t sleep without the lights on wasn’t exactly the best for relationship advice. And a sixteen-year-old was an entirely different prospect from a six-year-old like Posy. Hell, he had no idea how Johanna would cope with poor little Lindy, or if Coin with her perpetual correctness would even let Johanna adopt her, given the risk of the battlefield. 

Still…every time he managed to come up with a hesitation, his mind sharply reminded him of one essential thing. He’d long been seen as a feckless asshole who’d abandoned Twelve’s children in their hour of need when he was the sole person who could stand for them. Perhaps he’d been able to do so much less than people imagined, but he’d failed them anyway. So he couldn’t abandon these kids, now that he actually had the chance and the choice to intervene to save them—not from death, true, but from a lousy fate nonetheless. He couldn’t stand aside and say, “Not my problem” and walk away with clean hands and a clean conscience, vaguely hoping someone else would step up to let his guilt off the hook and secretly fairly certain that nobody would.

Thoughts turned over and over in his mind like sharp shards of rock tumbling down the slopes of the mining valleys. But it was easier to think about what came next than to try to grasp Briar’s death. He’d lived with her dead for so long, and alive for only a short time, so in a way, it was only returning to the status quo, right? Twenty-five years of guilt had scarred him in a way that even her survival and friendship couldn’t erase. And the more he thought on it, the more Johanna’s words made sense. At least Briar had lived. Maybe that had been lies and hiding and twenty years given to the Peacekeeper Corps, but that hadn’t ruined that bright-burning spirit of hers. She’d lived her final years on her terms, loved a man fiercely, and died by her own decision to fight. She’d had far more courage than him to manage that. 

He was forty-one and burned out and broken, and he didn’t imagine there was anything left in him to muster for a second try at anything. No dreams for himself, only the steadiness that came from having something to work for, people to fight for, and thus given purpose. All that was left was to try to create a better world for those that could benefit from it. Now he’d have Vick and Posy to keep in mind, alongside Peeta. Well, he was going to tell Coin about assuming guardianship of Peeta, might as well tack two more kids onto it.

Finally, the last wisps of adrenaline faded out and the crash came, so somewhere over the middle of Panem, his exhausted body finally overwhelmed his busy mind and heart and he slept, a fitful and broken sleep filled with jagged, twisted dreams of blood and violence and the dead. He should have taken one of those damn sleeping pills from the bottle still jammed in his gear.

Spurred by those dreams, he lurched awake at someone touching him and only his harness restrained him in his seat. He must have looked fairly ridiculous flailing, trying to get away and be ready to fight, pinned in by the nylon webbing and metal buckles. But the momentary disorientation faded and he saw it was Gentian. To her credit, she didn’t seem to react out of the ordinary at all at a grown man coming out of sleep in a violent panic. “We’re here,” she said simply, turning away.

When he went aft and below to help out, some of the kids yawned and rubbed their eyes as if they’d just enjoyed a good nap, but on others he could see that stillness and hypervigilance upon waking. Vick was one of them, glancing around as if trying to decide exactly where the threat might be. “We’ve got nowhere to go, Mister Abernathy,” he said with a worried look at Posy. “Pa’s been gone so long, Ma’s gone, Gale’s gone…” He recited it in a voice like the dry rustle of autumn leaves, not allowing the pain to filter through. “We’ve got no aunts or uncles back home neither.”

The words _I’ll take care of you_ stuck in his throat. Making promises he couldn’t keep—he’d learned not to do that years and years ago. “I’ll be looking after you for now,” he said instead.

The look Vick gave him wasn’t the expected one, alarm and fear at being signed over to what amounted to Twelve’s bogeyman. Kids there hated him because they were terrified of being sent to the Capitol with him—and never coming back except in a plain white coffin. The boy was more than old enough to have had reaping-terror become a harsh reality for him, but instead he looked at him like Haymitch was the first flicker of hope he’d had in a while. Perhaps he’d seen there were other horrors than the Games. “Me and Posy both?” Vick said carefully.

Haymitch nodded. “Yeah.” He let his hand linger on Vick’s shoulder for a moment, not sure how to convey that sense that the boy could let down some of his burden, without condescending to the desperate pride of a child who’d felt like the sole protector of his younger sibling. So he just left it at that.

They brought the kids to Command, as per Coin’s orders, though the other victors waited there. The cries of joy filled his ears. Seeing Donny and Trina pile into Chantilly’s arms, and Farrow clinging quietly to a weeping Chaff with all her strength, and Ami, Bale, and Alfie standing there between Blight and Clover, almost made it all worth it. They’d done something good here.

He eyed the rest even as Coin did—twenty-three children, for whom there was no quick reunion with family. “As I understand it, from our meeting in the absence of the rescue squad,” Coin said, “although some of them may not be present, most of these children have living relatives, or at least relatives in Capitol custody not known to be deceased.”

“Correct,” Wiress said, nodding, looking at the black-haired little girl in too-short trousers showing off her ankles, a little girl with that ashy-gold Three skin. Niece? Great-niece? To be honest, Haymitch couldn’t say.

“As discussed,” Beetee added, “those of us not on combat duties will help take on guardianship of those children until such time as their relatives can take them.” He gave Haymitch a sidelong, almost amused glance. “I believe the philosophy is ‘we take care of our own’, isn’t it?”

He couldn’t help a slight smile himself at that. “Very well,” Coin said coolly, “although as we agreed, four of you can hardly act as effective guardians for twenty children—twenty-three, really, given your own children, McCormick and Dumas. Therefore guardianship duties will be shared with others here in the meantime.”

Wiress shrugged and gave him an apologetic glance as if to say, _It was the best we could get._ “As for the children clearly confirmed to be without any living relatives…there are now three of them, correct? Harrvick Hawthorne, Posy Hawthorne, and Belinda Amsell.” Her gimlet eyes picked out the two Twelve children and the little Seven girl. Haymitch watched Vick step slightly in front of Posy, instinctively protecting her, and how Lindy moved closer to him.

“Yes, there’s nobody left for them,” he said, catching Fog’s eye as he sat at a console scribbling notes away, probably having caught a fresh draft of information from his spies. “Parents are gone, no aunts, no uncles, no grandparents.”

Haymitch shook his head slightly to let the man know that Apollonia hadn’t made it, or Rube. There would be time to talk it over later, but to his credit, Fog simply acknowledged it with a slight nod and looked away. But before he turned there was a look on his face as though he’d been punched, and suddenly Haymitch had a gut-deep certainty that Phineas Fog had known and loved the woman Apollonia Rackham became far more truly than Haymitch’s youthful recollections of a teenage girl long gone, and in that moment Fog mourned a daughter with a careful stoicism. “I’m standing for the Hawthornes—Vick and Posy,” he specified, spoke up quickly, sensing he’d damn well better hurry to do it.

“And I’m taking Lindy,” Johanna said immediately.

That caught Coin aback, which he would have enjoyed as a rare sight except for the fact that there was far more on the line here than his own amusement at getting one over on her. “I’m afraid not,” she said, recovering her composure.

“And why not?” Johanna’s voice had gone to that careful, level tone that Haymitch appreciated full well was the sole warning before the explosion.

“Children are a precious asset here in District Thirteen.” Yeah, he’d seen how few of them they had, but he restrained a cynical snort at the cold word _asset_. “There are many couples here who could readily provide stable, two-parent homes for an orphaned child. So to grant custody to two single parents, not to mention two people currently in treatment for psychiatric issues…”

Shit. She had a point, and he hadn’t thought about the way children were a valuable thing in Thirteen, as opposed to being more or less in disposable excess out in the districts. He could feel the kids slipping through his fingers, and there was that same feeling of fucking _helplessness_ that he’d always had when pleading with the sponsors who had their minds made up. But there was one last card left to play here. He could only hope it was the correct one. “Plutarch?” Haymitch said carefully, not looking aside at the Gamemaker, sitting beside Fog. “The Phoenix takes on raising the daughter of her childhood friend, who she just rescued from the Capitol—as a gesture of honor in the memory of a loved one lost, it makes a powerful propo, don’t you think?”

Oh, it was cynical and mercenary as hell at first blush. But then he’d been in the business before of having to package and polish and deliberately market kids on camera to try to help them in a desperate hour. He didn’t have the luxury of moral horror at it anymore. That was for those who’d never faced those situations and needed to make the hard choices. Johanna, or Lindy, could kick his ass for it later if they were so inclined, but for right now, he had to get it done, no matter the cost. “It does indeed,” Plutarch replied, his pale blue eyes alight already at imagining it. “The theme of it ties in really nicely with the ‘We Remember’ initiative too, I’ll be honest.” He looked over at President Coin. “You do have to admit it’s rather more powerful than saying she let the child go to a couple in District Thirteen who never knew District Seven or the girl’s parents. Not to mention the Phoenix taking on the role of motherhood fits with our message of saving the nation for the children of Panem—now she’ll be able to better reach those who _are_ fighting for the sake of their children.”

He didn’t dare look at Johanna, silently apologizing to her all the same, hoping he hadn’t put a foot wrong here. But given the honesty between them lately, that growing bond of trust and how he’d come to know her better—he didn’t feel like he was presuming too much. It felt like what she would have done. Hell, it was reckless and impulsive enough. 

Sensing the tide turning, if Coin made an exception for Johanna, he felt then he could push again for Vick and Posy and argue for it. Coin’s eyes narrowed slightly, winter frost boring into him and then turning to glare at Johanna. “You must admit, Mason, you’ve gotten visible privileges above the average citizen already with your surface liberty. Openly flaunting priority in adoption over perfectly suitable couples is too much. We maintain order here with equality, and while I could excuse your surface liberty as hunting for the good of the communal food supply—and I’d advise you to have more success at your hunting in the future to continue to justify it, by the way—this one isn’t so easily hidden. It could cause bad feeling here, and I won’t have it.”

“And if I were married?” Johanna said, voice taking on a steely edge. “Does that erase our little problem?”

“There’ll still be some complaint from approved couples already waiting on the adoption list, but yes, it would help immensely.”

He had the sense Coin didn’t exactly give a damn what happened to the kids just so long as the paperwork was in order and nobody bitched. Johanna shot him a look, sharp and a little wild, wide-eyed. It took him a moment to recognize it. He’d never seen her pleading for anything. It was more her style to provoke, to demand, to be the aggressive and dominating one.

It took him even longer to actually _get it_. To be fair, though, him and marriage had been two mutually exclusive concepts for so long. But it dawned on him and with a mental deep breath before the plunge, he leapt right into it, as he’d jumped into that clearing so long ago, trusting only in the certainty that to hang back or turn tail meant losing the only chance to get through it. “Oh, good, then looks like we can solve all our little problems here in one fell swoop,” he said, smiling at Coin as cheerfully as he could. “So if we get hitched, hey, you wouldn’t mind throwing guardianship of Peeta in while you’re at it, would you?”

“So, you’ll marry Abernathy,” Coin said to Johanna. He saw Fog’s eyebrows rise rapidly at that and made a slight gesture telling him to simmer down and stay quiet.

“Why, with your permission, of course,” Haymitch said, putting as much acid-laced sweetness into the words as he possibly could. He didn’t look aside at Vick, the only one of the three old enough to really understand what was going on, but out of the corner of his eye the boy appeared dangerously still, waiting to see what his fate would be.

Coin didn’t consider it too long. “It does resolve all the issues neatly. Very well. Reflection is in two hours. Be at Records and you can sign marriage papers then, adoption papers for the children, and receive your new housing assignment.” Her eyes raked over the victors. “Actually, all of you should be there given that you’ll need new housing assignments.”

“That’s it?” Plutarch protested, stepping in between them. “Signing _papers_? No, it won’t do.”

“It’s all that’s required here in District Thirteen, Heavensbee, as you should remember.”

“I’m aware,” Plutarch replied, throwing his hands in the air, “but _really_ , ma’am, we’re selling this woman,” Johanna let out a soft, derisive cackle of laughter, presumably at the word _selling_ , “as something of the heir to Katniss Everdeen, the face of the rebellion. The people were cheated of watching Peeta and Katniss wed, you know.”

“Oh for cryin’ in the woods, do you really think ninety percent of the people out in the districts gave a single fuck about an overblown Capitol wedding?” Johanna asked him dryly.

“Language, c’mon, hey,” Chaff muttered at her, waving his hand towards the kids crossly. Haymitch stared at him, half in a daze. He’d never known Chaff like this—Chaff the father, protective of his child even in such small ways. It was like looking at someone suddenly half a stranger. _I never really knew any of them at all, did I? I knew the victors, but not the people._ Not even Johanna, who’d had nothing else—not until recently. _I say ‘fuck’ all the time. Shit. Me? Around kids? I must be crazy._

“Sorry,” she muttered, looking irritated.

“Perhaps the districts might not want to see that lavish a wedding,” Plutarch conceded, _but_ it’ll play better to give them something rather than saying you signed papers in secret. And for the Capitol, well, showing them two people in love, adopting orphaned children—it’s a powerful statement for our side and Snow’s going to have to try hard to counter that. Give them something besides battles and speeches and secrets. Win some Capitol hearts back, and make our job that much easier, don’t you think? They’ve always noted a close friendship between you and Johanna. That makes it easily believable that now, with the freedom from the Games and your inability to be together for most of the year…”

He had to tune Plutarch out as the man kept excitably going on about this latest scheme so he didn’t lose his temper. Now Haymitch was the one trying to not snort derisively, feeling the jaws close in around him and wryly aware must have been how Katniss felt. Trapped, stuck in a plan necessary to keep going, but panicking all the same. _Love?_ He respected Johanna, trusted her, cared for her. But love…well, at least he wasn’t a surly seventeen-year-old with poor acting skills. He’d had to sell himself flawlessly for years to men and women who wanted him to play the lover and make them believe it. At least Johanna wouldn’t demand that of him, even if Plutarch apparently would.

Irony was a bitch for sure. Although maybe it wasn’t irony so much as due justice—he tried not to laugh. It was like his own sins in what he’d urged the kids to do in order to survive, to keep people safe, now turned around to bind him just the same. _Say you’re deeply in love and have been for years? Of course. Play it up for the cameras? Oh, why not, done it before. Get married to help play to the crowd, and to fulfill the demands of a president? Certainly. At least I don’t have to propose to her on bended knee on Caesar’s stage. And it’s not like she was safe before, not like being associated with me makes her a target._

Oh, such romantic thoughts for a bridegroom to have.

He looked at Plutarch and read his look like it was printed words on a page. _Quid pro quo_ , as they’d say in the Capitol, and out in Twelve it would be, _I scratch your back, you scratch mine._ Plutarch had backed them on the issue of adopting the kids, and he was calling the debt due on the matter of the wedding.

Johanna must have come to the same conclusion. “We should keep it small,” she said, voice oddly colorless. “Tasteful. It’ll just look tacky to hold a lavish _thing_ in wartime, and it’ll look Capitol. And for us—let’s face it, we’re not exactly…”

Not the shining fairytale figures that Katniss and Peeta, or even Finnick and Annie, would have been, Haymitch finished her thought silently in his head.

“They’ve responded quite well to you, actually—to both of you. These are complicated times now that we’re actually at war,” Plutarch returned neatly. “Perhaps we misjudged Katniss—perhaps it wasn’t youthful naïvete that people needed to see, so much as the deliberate choices of those who’ve suffered deeply, as they have.” Haymitch let out an angry hiss of breath at that, like the steam whistle out at the mines, hearing the girl so easily dismissed. All the ways they’d bent and shaped her and finally gotten her killed because she was supposedly the great hope for the country, and now Plutarch obviously threw Katniss aside like yesterday’s garbage. He ought to stab the man through the eye with that fucking mockingjay pin. Johanna shot him a warning look, telling him to keep it to himself. Now wasn’t that a reversal? Though honestly, to him it seemed like everything was a bit ass-over-elbows today.

“Fine,” he said curtly. Already he could see it was a battle that was stupid to fight, a worthless gesture. Better to save his time and energy for things he could actually win, and for situations where Plutarch and Coin weren’t already braced up and forewarned. Didn’t really matter, did it? Wear something fancier than the grey shirt and trousers, maybe cut a cake—didn’t make any of it more _real_. The only real thing was that he trusted Johanna, and that he’d do anything he could to keep those kids safe after the hell they’d been through. All of them, Peeta included. “We’ll sign the papers for President Coin today, and talk arrangements for your propo later. Right now, I want these kids down to the infirmary to make sure they’re all OK.”

Coin didn’t even acknowledge that. He turned to go, unable to look at Johanna just then, heading for Vick, praying like hell that he hadn’t scared the shit out of the kid. Crouching down, he leaned in and said too quietly for the others to hear, “If you’d rather it be some other way…”

Vick looked at him solemnly. “You came to rescue us. You’re willing to look after us even if we ain’t your kids. That’s enough for me.” He’d been the sweetest of the three Hawthorne boys, by Hazelle and Katniss’ accounts. Haymitch could easily see it. The simple, clean-hearted trust of that broke him more than Coin’s dismissive comments, Plutarch’s cynical schemes. He’d long since armored himself against those, but against this, he had nothing. Fuck. How long since he’d encountered anything as genuine as that sort of innocent good faith? The fear ran through him like a shiver. He couldn’t fail. Not at this. Couldn’t bear to recall the looks of young kids, so many years ago when Haymitch was barely still more than a kid himself by years even if not in spirit—who’d looked at him with that kind of desperate faith that he’d somehow rescue them. That was before they’d learned better, and even twelve-year-olds didn’t turn to him with hope in their eyes.

“You’re my kids now,” he said, touching Vick carefully on the shoulder, mindful of the echo of the words he’d said to Peeta earlier. A promise made, binding him tightly with something stronger than steel—something more sincere than whatever wedding vows he and Johanna would have to make, ones that they’d be able to undo once they were out of the madness that was District Thirteen. To hell with the propos and Plutarch’s whining about the bad publicity of a divorce, he wouldn’t bind her in a lie—it wasn’t like Katniss and Peeta, there would be other choices eventually.

Seeing Lindy clinging to Johanna as tightly as Posy had been earlier, he breathed a sigh of relief to avoid that conversation for a few more minutes. Still, it at least seemed like they were on the same page regarding the broad strokes.

He turned to Posy next, clinging to Vick’s side. “Let’s get you downstairs, sweetheart. Gotta have the doctor take a look and make sure you’re OK.”

She looked up at him, wide granite-grey eyes and heart-shaped face so much like her mother’s and her aunt’s. The sight didn’t break his heart for lost love, only for both lives cut short, for a woman who’d never had a chance to know her niece, for a little girl left scared and alone. “I want her to go too,” Posy whispered, pointing at Johanna.

Well, he _tried_ to not take it as rejection. At least she didn’t hate and fear him—like he’d told Johanna, made sense the girl would be more comfortable with another woman. “She’ll be coming with us,” he told Posy.

“I’ll be staying with you,” Johanna said firmly, standing there now with Lindy on her hip, the child’s tiny fists knotted in her shirt. She looked oddly natural like that—protective, fierce like a mother bear. With that assurance, Posy nodded. Vick held a hand out for hers, and she took it. 

“We’ll figure it out,” he told Johanna in a murmur as she passed him, leading the parade of adults and children down to the infirmary, fighting to stay ahead of it in his mind and to not let the feelings of panic at what would happen now and guilt at roping her into this too overwhelm him. _Not your victim,_ he reminded himself, but as a seed it had only hard soil to take root in, let alone hope to flourish. They’d have to have some time alone to talk, to make some kind of plan about all this. By the latest, tomorrow afternoon with their usual surface liberty. They’d need every minute of it.


	26. Chapter 26

The initial view was that the kids were all right, so Harcourt and the other doctors announced in a brisk, official manner—though Haymitch wryly understood that pronouncement to be “all right” in the sense that they didn’t have broken bones or poison in their veins or internal injuries or their throat half-cut open or their guts bulging from a slice through their abdominal wall. “All right” in the sense that their bodies weren’t acutely damaged, and actually, in the case of Lindy, Vick, and Posy, children who’d come from poor districts and hadn’t existed under the wealthy aegis of a victor in the family, their frames were probably better-fleshed than they’d ever been in their lives. It was probably the same too for the kids who were nieces and nephews and grandchildren, who couldn’t be supported by a more distant victor relation than that of a parent for a minor child.

Tiny Posy’s cheeks were downright round and rosy. He’d been able to carefully help Hazelle well enough in those hollow months between Thread’s arrival and Reaping Day, but watched so closely, not so much that like every Twelve child since he was a boy himself, one could clearly see the delicate ridge of cheekbones and brow on Posy and Vick and even Rory, years ahead of when they should emerge from childish softness.

But not all wounds showed on the flesh, and unlike the hungry, hollow-cheeked boy he’d been, now he’d learned well those hidden injuries to the soul and mind were usually the ones that lingered far longer and with far more pain.

Harcourt pulled him aside for a moment as another of the doctors, Lindley, took over the exam. “I unfortunately forgot to mention to President Coin that as a certified medic, I’d permitted you to take a bottle of sleep capsules on this mission, anticipating that the children might need to be sedated. The whole matter’s been straightened out.”

“Oh, good, sorry if it caused a ruckus,” he said, shocked that the man would cover it up like that. Perhaps there were some flickers of humanity and sensibility here and there in some Thirteen folks. Although to be fair, Harcourt had always been one of the kinder doctors. Haymitch had the feeling that in a less strict environment, he’d be able to give even better care. “I’ll make sure the rest of the bottle’s returned, of course.”

“Of course.” Harcourt’s steel-blue eyes met his levelly. “Though you’ll probably be getting some of them for a prescription for the children each day. I imagine the first couple of weeks will be…difficult for them. They’ll need to get adequate rest, and with them right there in the same room, it would disturb your sleep as well. And you may be off the sleep meds yourself for now, but I can’t imagine children with nightmares will do you much good.”

Sleeping with kids in the same room—fuck, he hadn’t even thought ahead to the details of that. Uncomfortably aware that Harcourt deduced a little too much, Haymitch looked away. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

Seeing Peeta coming back to his bed escorted by one of the therapists, his body pale and sagging and sweaty like a wrung-out rag, obviously he’d exhausted himself at physical therapy trying to train up with two prostheses now. He glanced over at Johanna, and didn’t even have to say anything. She nodded towards Peeta, then towards the younger kids. “Go. I’ve got ‘em.”

Gratefully, he headed over towards Peeta, arriving just as he finished unfastening both the prostheses. The fresh stump of his right leg, about a hand’s span shorter than his left, looked raw and angry and red, rubbed and irritated by the pressure of the padded cup of the prosthesis. Peeta caught Haymitch staring at it. “About on par with last time, I’d say,” he said with a faint shrug. “Though I’m getting better faster this time with a proper therapist—well, that and having done it once already.”

Peeta hadn’t let him see the stump last time during those months of clumsy fumbling with no support out in Twelve, and only the sense that, as Haymitch remarked dryly one evening while well into a bottle of white liquor, Peeta could get away with limping on the Tour because “the wounded hero” act would still be sympathetic to people, but after that, he’d best try to get away from it lest he be seen as just another damaged cripple. What he hadn’t said that day was that perhaps that was the best thing that could happen to Peeta, or any other victor—to become something that the Capitol turned its eyes away from in discomfort or even disgust. Hell, it had taken Haymitch nearly twenty years to get to that point. But for Peeta, it was pride, perhaps, or careful distance from a man he didn’t know how to fathom yet in terms of what he felt and what he owed, that kept him from sharing that struggle with Haymitch.

No such barrier now. Haymitch wasn’t quite under illusions that they’d suddenly become _that_ close, but he could recognize the power of being the only one left that the boy felt he could halfway trust, the only one he could turn to in the turmoil. The memory of Peeta crying on his shoulder, the promise he’d made, was still sharp.

He sat down in the chair beside the bed as Peeta hauled himself back up against the pillows, formerly strong arms trembling with the effort after weeks of wasting away in this bed. He didn’t offer to help, sensing it would wound what fragile pride Peeta had far too much. He did notice Peeta didn’t pull up the blanket or even roll down his trouser legs to cover the stumps. “So we got ‘em back,” he told Peeta.

Something relaxed in Peeta’s face, and it wasn’t quite a smile, but it was the first glimmer of something finer than pained endurance or sorrow that Haymitch had seen there since he woke up in this hospital. “That’s good.”

“Yeah, well…” He coughed awkwardly, hating the feeling of being pinned down by the necessity of saying things, opening up too much. “Most of the kids have kinfolk to claim them, here or eventually, but Vick and Posy, and Lindy from Seven—not so lucky. Johanna and I are gonna look after them.”

Katniss would have missed it, or assumed he referred to them separately, but Peeta was a sharper sort when it came to perception. “You mean, together?” he questioned carefully, turning blue eyes on Haymitch with interest. “ _Together_ together?”

He nodded. “Coin was gonna let ‘em go to couples here in Thirteen rather than see them taken in by single people. So.”

“Well, not like it hasn’t been done. Ma and Pa certainly got married for the sake of a kid.” There was a smile on Peeta’s face that didn’t belong there, something momentarily bitter and twisted. But it cleared and he added, calmer, “Plenty of other couples took up together because of having young kids.”

No, it wasn’t all that unusual in Twelve for a widow or widower to hastily remarry in a purely practical union. After the explosion five and a half years back, there must have been a dozen weddings within a month. Hazelle and Perulla had been the exceptions. As for Perulla, well, she’d never belonged in the Seam and they all knew it, and her own merchie folk didn’t want her back. As for Hazelle—he doubted it was pride that kept her widowed and alone. She’d been far too practical. Like as not, the hardships of becoming stepfather to four children, one a pure newborn, was a lot for a mining man to take on, particularly if he had kids already, or wanted children of his own in the future.

 _Yeah, well, you’re taking on four kids and not a one of them of your blood,_ he realized, and couldn’t help a snort of nervous laughter. Peeta cocked an eyebrow at that, but let it go. “Well, congratulations.” Trust Peeta to put the finest spin on it.

“Plutarch wants a big to-do in a week or so, for filming.” He shrugged.

“Oh, good. I’ll make you both a cake. I can bake even if I have to do it from a wheelchair.”

“Peeta…” 

Peeta shrugged. “Plutarch’s going to demand one, I imagine. And I’d rather the cake come from me in that case—you and Johanna probably would as well. Besides, it’ll be a nice selling point for the cameras.”

The fact the boy could so easily think of that angle by now stung. The words stuck in his throat now, apologies and all. “I’m sorry,” he said lowly, not giving any justifications or explanations. It had been needed, to do what they’d done, what he’d guided them into so he could better protect them, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been a shitty thing anyway.

No explanation needed, apparently. “I just…wish it had been real with her,” Peeta said finally, voice thick, as if he struggled to push each word up past the lump in his throat. “Even if just for a little while.”

“Oh, boy…Peeta,” he said, shaking his head, curiously able to ache for the disillusionment and hurts of this boy in a way he never could for himself. “It was real. Trust me on that.” Though it was a cruel kindness, saying that and bringing up the specter of all the things that now couldn’t ever be. 

“You wouldn’t say that just to make me feel better, would you?” Peeta said, eyes glittering suspiciously bright.

“Now when have you ever known me to be sensitive to feelings?” But that was too glib, too snarky, striking at where Peeta still probably felt raw and hurt. “It’s—she was too important to you.” Maybe a little too important to Haymitch as well, though he wouldn’t say so openly. “So no. No lies. She might not have realized it enough yet to really name it, let alone tell you so, but…really, you should have seen her stomping into my house after the card got read, insisting she was going to die for you.” At the time he’d wanted to roll his eyes a bit at the stupidly romantic notions of teenagers, but he’d recognized it for what it was. “She wasn’t offering herself up only to pay some notion of debt to you.” He smiled wryly. “Even Seam obligation’s got its limits.”

“So does Seam obligation include taking in Vick and Posy?” That too-sharp gaze again. “And me too, I imagine?”

Instinctively, he replied, “If there’s anyone else you’d rather see take you on as a guardian…”

“No, I’d just as soon have it be you.” A faint wan smile and Peeta went on, “Though having Johanna as my—what even is she going to be? Stepmentor?”

Haymitch got a small chuckle out of that, but then sobered. “Yes, and no. You ever care for someone, about someone, you always end up owing them something. Debt, or gratitude, or whatever you want to call it. So long as that’s not the only part of things.” This was one area Katniss would have understood without the explanation that Peeta needed. Even half-merchie as she was, she’d grown up part of the tangled web of Seam obligations and affection, and got the notion that the two existed always intertwined. But it was harder for Peeta to understand—his had been such a loveless childhood that chances were he was wandering darkened tunnels here without even the tiniest flicker from a miner’s lamp for guidance.

Gratitude and obligation was a part of caring—so in the end, perhaps he’d loved Apollonia still, and even loved Hazelle, in a way that had nothing to do with romance. Perhaps just so, they’d cared in the same way for him in some small way.

Although it was Seam obligation that kept him alive, all those years ago—plenty of sleepless nights he’d sit there with that knife in his hand, staring at the brightness of the metal as if hypnotized by it. Sometimes he’d go so far as to hold it against the skin of his wrist, feeling the cold kiss of the metal, imagining one swift stroke, and then another on the other side. Clumsier, of course, because he was right-handed, but he could do the job anyway. It would have had to be done by a knife—there seemed a sense of justice to it after the kids he’d killed that way.

Debt kept him bound to life. All the dead on his account and the weight of that guilt, and the realization that if he took that way out, next year’s tributes would have the same disinterested Career-surplus mentor as he had, rather than someone fighting with all their heart and wits to keep them alive. Living was his atonement, what he owed. But maybe a merchie boy wouldn’t understand that as well, and he remembered far too well the searing, unsupportable pain of being so young and losing his entire world. _Not him too,_ he vowed silently.

“I’ll get the papers signed,” he said gruffly, given Peeta’s permission now, seeing the boy’s exhausted look and his eyelids already drooping. “Make sure you get a bed in whatever compartment they put us in, since you only need to be here for your physical therapy now.” It would likely do the boy a world of good to get the hell out of here.

Peeta nodded at that. “The nurse said he’d help me up to Records, so I’ll meet you there. Congratulations,” he said quietly, eyes meeting Haymitch’s. “And…I hope it’s real for you two. Someday.”

Dammit. Wrestling with his own problems as he was, the boy still had the goodness to say something like that. Unable to bear that kindness, and unable to bear the vast and frightening notion those words could open up for him— _something real_ —Haymitch just nodded in acknowledgment, and went to go collect the other kids and get himself married.

~~~~~~~~~~

To Johanna’s surprise, Blight asked to talk to her for a second as she left the infirmary. “Go on ahead,” she told Haymitch and the kids.

Vick followed readily enough, and Lindy as well, scooped up in Haymitch’s arms and half-drowsing on his shoulder already—so young that perhaps she could readily associate Haymitch, the man who’d rescued her, with the warmth and security of her father. But Posy hesitated, looked at Johanna, at Haymitch, then back at Johanna, her features full of reluctance and indecision. She crouched down, getting more on the little girl’s level. “I’ll be right along,” she promised. Those eyes—they were darker than Haymitch’s, more like Katniss’ had been. _She’s never had a father,_ recalling again Haymitch’s mention of that. If anyone would understand that, he would, given that he’d grown up with the belief his father died when he was even younger than Lindy was now. But Posy turned to her, and maybe it was all right it had turned out this way rather than her being adopted solely by Haymitch, but the weight of it felt heavy, even oppressive still. Everything was changing. In her own way, she was as afraid as Posy right now. 

But at least, she amended, she trusted Haymitch, knew him probably best of all the male victors by this point. It could have been far worse. If he hadn’t picked up on what she was asking him during that discussion with Coin, she’d have had to try to drag someone else in. Or, frankly, if he’d balked at it, but instead he’d stepped smoothly into the dance. 

“Poe,” Vick said softly, “it’s OK.”

She watched until they turned the corner, and then looked back at Blight. “Yeah?” She winced, realizing how harsh and aggressive it sounded. It was how she would have spoken to him months ago, not this new Johanna, and not to the Blight who’d done his best to confess his failings and ask her forgiveness. He hadn’t let her down since the war began, and it had to be rough right now for him, dealing with the daughter he’d never known as well as two nephews. Probably a sign of how out of whack and anxious she was right now, easily stepping back in the tracks of old habits. “What did you need?” she asked, consciously making it sound more casual, more open.

He held a hand out to her, offering a bandana, a bright blue rich as the sapphires that she’d seen on the necks and fingers and wrists of Capitolites both male and female, a richer and deeper blue than Eight’s district color. “I managed to wrangle this from Supply for signing the papers here with Clover,” he said, meeting her gaze. “Figured you might want to wear it too, unless you want to try to go get them to give you one as well.”

“No, seems they’re only stocking Phoenix red bandanas these days,” she answered him dryly. Blue—the lucky color at a Seven wedding, and the brighter the better. Getting an entire shirt or vest or skirt or even a full dress was a forlorn hope except for the wealthiest merchants and craftsmen. Dye to make a true, rich blue was too expensive. And the very poorest often had to content themselves with sky blue or even the washed-out blue grey of a daily-wear shirt. But those who could tried to wear at least some small thing in that bright shade. A tie sometimes for the men, but frequently, it was a bandana. The things were everywhere in Seven, after all, tucked in pockets and tied around necks, knotted around foreheads as sweatbands. People bought any other color at the store, with Seven green usually the biggest stock, well aware that engaged couples would want the blue ones. Usually after the wedding that bandana was worn in practical fashion just like any other, fading from sweat and sun and washing like any other until the fabric finally gave way. But obviously Blight had tucked this one away after his wedding to Clover here, because the blue looked pristine.

She realized he looked at her as if he half-expected her to reject it. Touched by the gesture, she reached out and took the bandana. She held back the words, _You know I don’t need this, because it isn’t real between Haymitch and me._ If it had been, it would have bothered her far more than her mom and dad wouldn’t be there to see it, particularly knowing now that they were alive and well. Chances were they’d be there for whenever Plutarch made them film a wedding with all its attendant trappings. She wasn’t sure whether or not to tell them it was all a lie. One of the first things she’d say to them after nine years apart and so many things changed would be, _Come to my wedding but it’s all bullshit, sorry?_ She’d worry about that later, as there was more than enough on her plate today dealing with kids who needed her, rather than her parents. 

Maybe it was all a sham—or rather a pretty platonic marriage hurriedly made out of pure necessity—but the fact that Blight had at least tried meant something anyway. “Figured regardless of anything, a little luck never hurt anyone,” Blight returned genially, letting go of the fabric. He hesitated and added in a rush, “You’re doing a good thing for little Lindy. The right thing. If…if it gets to be too much…or if you and Haymitch ever don’t come back…”

Now she understood what he was getting at here. The offer made—an implicit promise—that if Lindy needed somewhere else to go, Blight would stand for her and make her his own daughter. Maybe that, more than anything, said how much the man had found his courage. “Thanks, good to know,” she said quietly, well aware that neither of them wanted this moment to become a big thing. “Same for you and Clover.” It was a rash promise, given that she was taking in three kids—four with Peeta, really—and three more youngens would be overwhelming, but the thought of Ami, Bale, and Alfie left orphaned again tugged at her too much.

Clover had nobody else to turn to from Nine—Amaranth and Rye both died in the arena. Haymitch didn’t either—Katniss was dead, and Peeta was still half a child himself, under Haymitch’s guardianship. So she and Blight were the two people of their half-squad who could stand for each other and make that promise that if the worst came, their kids would grow up with someone who’d be able to teach them about Seven. Strange to feel that bond between them, a tie of blood and birth tugging in a way it never had in all the years Blight politely kept his distance from her and from the tributes, but it was there all the same.

Winding the bandana into a scarf, she knotted it around her neck, settling it carefully there. She couldn’t bear the pressure of choker necklaces or high necklines or tight scarves after some of her patrons and their idea of “fun”, so it was still a bit loose. “You want this back after?”

“Nope, keep it.” He smiled slightly, an expression that made his hazel eyes crinkle at the corners. “The real one, I had years ago.” Back when he’d had the ceremony with Clover that mattered, she supposed—rather than the sterile paper-signing here in Thirteen. There would be no wedding trees for her today either, no piece of wedding furniture she’d made with her fiancé to help make their new house a home. That was all right. That would have made it feel more like a sham, and she’d have to do enough pretending for Plutarch anyway. At least Haymitch wouldn’t expect it of her. 

Well, she probably could use all the luck she could get, so she wouldn’t spit on it. Nodding to him again in thanks, she headed up towards Records.

It wasn’t much. The clerk asked them if they were marrying of their own free will. She didn’t look over at Haymitch as she answered, “Yeah, of course.” It was her choice, at the least. Maybe it wasn’t what she’d wanted out of life, but that irritation was with Coin, not him.

She stared instead at the clerk’s hand as he stamped the paper with the District Thirteen seal in bold, black ink that glistened as it dried. The faded grey sleeve smudged with ink, the deep walnut skin fading to the lighter red-brown of heartwood on the palm side of his fingers curled around the stamp, dark against the thin paper, a drab and unbleached grey. Of course they’d keep the record of this on the computer, but she wondered if the couple’s copy of marriage papers here lasted all that long, made on such cheap and flimsy paper. Probably an interesting bet in her case as to whether the paper or the marriage itself would last longer.

Focusing on that and chiding Thirteen for making such crappy paper, she startled to hear Haymitch’s awkward cough next to her, obviously meant to jolt her back. “Huh?” she said.

“I said,” the clerk repeated, dark eyes steady on hers as if wondering if Johanna was actually a little nuts, “since the Medical Division has certified you both as fertile individuals, your marriage requires a little more in the way of requirements to be recognized as legal. You’ll need to do everything you can towards successful conception. Your CPC visits in particular will be scheduled with your cycle in mind. The doctors have already figured out your optimal cycle, Mason, and will put you both on necessary vitamins and supplements to help aid conception. If you haven’t conceived naturally within a year, you agree to pursuing what fertility treatments we can offer. Do you understand and accept those duties?”

Her first impulse was to wisecrack, _You’re killing me with the romance here._ But then the first realization struck. Tested as fertile? When the _fuck_ had they tested that, and how, and what about Haymitch? It made her skin crawl imagining it, tested without her knowledge, and then the true reality slammed home. They expected her— _them_ , he was her partner in this—to produce a kid.

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell the clerk to take the marriage papers and cram them up his ass, and her cheeks burned hot with a mix of embarrassment and anger. For fuck’s sake, he was saying that in front of the kids to boot, and Vick at least was old enough to understand most of it, and Peeta was definitely more than old enough. Shit. At least Haymitch’s dad wasn’t here, probably off doing his usual intel business, but it said plenty to her about either Haymitch’s relationship to Phineas Fog, or Haymitch’s thoughts about this marriage, or both, that the only blood relative either of them had here hadn’t come. Good thing it didn’t hurt. She’d have felt more pressure by Fog being there. Though the idea of her parents there for Plutarch’s damn propo-wedding plucked at her anxiety like guitar strings.

The clerk suddenly looked at Peeta guiltily, and there was actual regret on his face rather than the pleasantly bland official face he’d had before. “Oh. This is…it’s the regulations, you see, I have to say it. But I’m so sorry about your wife. And your child.”

It took her a second to follow. Oh yeah, the whole “married and pregnant” deal they’d cooked up for Katniss. Anyone with half a brain could have guessed that was bullshit, looking at the two of them together and the awkward-teenager-tension, but the Capitol had bought it. She couldn’t help but be glad that Plutarch hadn’t dragged up that whole supposed tragedy and made lumber from storm-fall wood, drowning it in sickly sweet melodrama and plastering it all over the television. More discretion than she’d typically give Plutarch credit for having, but then, Peeta had been unconscious or hidden away in the infirmary for the crucial days following, and they’d turned to her instead.

“Thanks,” Peeta said dully. She caught the faintly apologetic look Haymitch gave Peeta. Hell, even she felt the painful twist inside for the poor kid. Slathered in bullshit as the story had been, he’d still lost someone he cared for deeply.

“You’d best not be expecting him to start reproducing in a hurry for the good of this district,” Haymitch told the clerk, his voice with that cold, deadly edge that she’d come to realize was him finally giving way enough to broadcast that he was pissed, but still holding back his temper. She was put in mind again of that black-furred honeybear on the edge of attack, pacing tensely back and forth and giving a last chuff of warning to tell someone to get lost in a hurry.

“No, of course not, he’s not of age yet,” the clerk protested, obviously off balance now, glancing back and forth between Haymitch and Peeta. “Until he’s eighteen—we don’t go with nineteen here as the age of majority since the Reaping isn’t involved, you see—but until then he can’t even marry without a parent or guardian’s perm—“

“Good, that’s settled,” Haymitch cut him off neatly, folding his arms over his chest.

With that, it took barely another five minutes to sign their names to the paper, and for the clerk to furiously type and do whatever he had to do on his computer to reassign all six of them to a family compartment. “You’ll be in Compartment G, that’s a very nice one,” he said, finally handing over the paper. “As for your time in the CPC tonight, have you arranged for childcare, or—“

“CPC?” she interrupted.

Another of those chagrined looks greeted her. “Sorry, I’m new at this, and all the couples I’ve married have been natives. Uh, the Conjugal Privacy Cubicle, it’s providing some privacy time for couples who have children. You’ll see it listed on your daily schedule as ‘CPC’ and then a cubicle number. Newlyweds will be scheduled for two hours, three times a week, but as it’s your wedding day, you’ll have all the time between now and fifteen minutes before Lights Out, so that’s about three and a half hours now. You’re scheduled in CPC 14 tonight. There’s a shower and everything there for you as well, and a warning when you’re down to half an hour, so you won’t miss scheduled Bathing at 2200.”

Well—a shower and four hours. Not exactly Capitol dreams of champagne and roses for a wedding night, or even a Seven expectation of a night the late autumn with a roaring fire and thick blankets and cider from the neighbors.

It was pointless to ask if they could just skip the whole thing. Thirteen’s rules, and they had to follow them. Although she glanced over at Haymitch, wondering if he actually expected them to have sex tonight, and something churned in her stomach at the thought. Funny thing, she reflected, that the idea got to her since only a few months ago she could have fucked him without thinking too much about it, and gone on her merry way. 

“I’ll look after them tonight while you’re away, don’t worry,” Peeta said calmly, though she caught the dark flush in his fair skin, obviously embarrassed at the mercenary details of his new foster-parents being scheduled for sex. Not to mention the fact his new mommy was only eight or nine years older than him.

The fact Haymitch didn’t argue it told her that he wasn’t exactly at his sharpest in that moment either, but she let it go. “We’ll be back before 10:30, then,” he said grimly.

When they got there, the Conjugal Privacy Cubicle wasn’t much different from the other compartments: a bed barely large enough for two bodies in it, although the sheets and blankets were apparently laundered enough to have faded to a limp, thin, dirty-frost colorlessness that suggested that once they’d been that same tired grey as the ones back in her compartment. _Well,_ Johanna reflected wryly, _two hours is the usual, they said—lots of turnover, they probably have to do the laundry a hell of a lot._

The large digital blood-red numbers ticking down on the drab steel wall very helpfully informed her that she and Haymitch now had three hours, twenty-five minutes, and nineteen…eighteen seconds left. She suddenly had the insane wish that there had been one of those clinical, perfunctory clocks mounted on the wall of everywhere she’d been forced to go when Snow hired her out, something that she could stare at and take strength in knowing exactly when it would all be over.

“Ah, good, something to look at if the sex is that bad,” Haymitch murmured, jerking his chin towards the clock to indicate it. The relaxed, wry smirk on his lips was familiar enough, though how tightly his arms were folded over his chest and how he seemed as aware of the careful distance between them contradicted it neatly. He half-turned his wrist, staring at his forearm and the purple ink there in exaggerated fashion. “My, oh my—and here I figured they’d have scheduled exactly how many times we’re supposed to get at it and how long each should take. Maybe you’re supposed to watch that clock, time me, and nag me if I’m taking too long?”

Relief flooded through her—it all happened so fast today that it was a moment to laugh or let the screaming inside out, and with Haymitch, at least the laughing was a hell of a lot easier and he wouldn’t think she was crazy or a bitch for it. Besides, he understood how this felt too. It might not be undressing for a stranger, mutely submitting to unfamiliar hands on her body, but it felt degrading all the same—locked away here in this drab room in what passed for a three and a half-hour honeymoon and expected to fuck for the good of the district to pop out a kid as quickly as possible before she maybe died in the war. “That’s as well, since I’m sure me getting off would be a lucky rarity in that case—such an inefficient waste of babymaking time and energy, don’t you think?”

He gave a snort of amusement at that, “Oh, I’d never call that a waste. But…don’t know about you, but it’s been a hell of a long day and rather than us staring at each other for a few hours here, I’m thinking about a nap.”

“Could go for one too.” Although when she looked at the bed, she saw quickly enough that it was virtually impossible for two bodies to share that space without touching. She’d never fallen asleep with someone there, not since she was a kid sharing a bed with Heike, and now she’d have to have him there right next to her. The realization that she’d actually be sharing a bed, a room, and everything with him now hit her with a wave of panic, and she sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, breathing in roughly.

She felt the bed dip as he sat down—carefully keeping a small distance between them. Then there came the pressure of his hand on her shoulder, careful and light, as if unsure whether he’d even be permitted that much. Staring at her hands, she wasn’t sure whether she wanted that touch desperately, or wanted the safe space between them far more. _What the fuck did I just do?_

“Do you…” He faltered, and then started again. “Do you want…would it help if I…if we…”

Hearing his voice, so obviously off-kilter and uncertain, hit home—shorn of his quips and his snark, and the confidence he owned when it was scheming or the like, now she could hear that he was as overwhelmed as her. She hadn’t mulled it over too much at the time, desperate as she was. But it struck her now what this cost him. Asking him to play-act the happy husband too must have been even more acutely painful, though, given Katniss and Peeta last year, and what they’d expected of him on the circuit. They’d wanted her to play the bitch—illusions of love never entered into it, only dominating or being dominated. They’d wanted him to play the arrogant lover. 

It would be so easy to turn to him, in some ways, to feel good, to lose herself in something that wasn’t hardship and worry and misery. She doubted he’d lost what skill he’d had. Too easy to turn to him, and hold herself apart enough from the act that it wouldn’t mean anything too dangerous—just two friends giving each other a little bit of much-needed comfort.

 _You use people,_ Cashmere’s voice hissed angrily in her mind. And Haymitch’s impatiently snapping from the hovercraft on the way here from the arena, _I played the whore for you once, I ain’t doing it again._ She had used him all those years ago, seen him like a whore there for her use. Once again she’d played her desperation right into his agreement—although at least this time he got something out of it, didn’t he? But here he was again, in spite of decisively refusing her before, ready to fuck her if she asked, and the notion actually hurt in a way.

It made her want to break down crying, it made her want to punch something, and she couldn’t even explain why to herself, let alone to him. “What the hell did we do?”

His hand lifted from her shoulder. “What we had to do.”

“We don’t have to give them this,” she said grimly. “I’m not fucking you, or anyone, just because they expect it.” Wasn’t that a bitch? Her sex life was once again a government-mandated thing. The more some things changed, the more others stayed the same. Though at least they’d let her pick the man.

“I wasn’t offering because _they_ said so,” and now there was an irritated, barbed edge to his words, and she almost smiled in relief because the comfortable familiarity of that helped. “I’ve done more than enough fucking on command. Only if you want it.”

No, he wasn’t putting this on her. “So what, do you want it?” She couldn’t force the last word out differently, couldn’t ask, _Do you want me?_ He didn’t answer. That was answer enough. She looked over, seeing him sitting there staring at his hands, not looking at her. Almost longing for a fight, because that was far better than the awkwardness and somehow it felt like it would make sense of things, she demanded, “So what, I’m not your type? What is it? Thinner, taller, blond, redhead, dark eyes, older, younger—are you actually more into guys than women? What?” She could have laughed at it: another man who didn’t really want her. Good enough to be the fuck-of-the-night for Capitol assholes, but that was it.

“What, do you have to make it all about you?” he scoffed.

Well, that did it. “Don’t do it as some kind of favor,” she snapped at him, “because I don’t want you holding it over my head in six months that I twisted your arm again. So unless you _actually_ want this to happen with me, go ahead and keep your trousers zipped. Because no, I don’t want you needing to feel like a righteous martyr because you were good enough to fuck me.”

Now came the explosion, and that honeybear that had been giving a warning growl suddenly was in charge-and-roar mode. “And I don’t want to deal with this passive-aggressive crap of you making me feel like I’m treating you like crap for not giving you everything you want.”

She laughed, pushing up to her feet, looking down at him, his grey eyes now sharp and hard like the edge of a razor. “Oh, honeybear, you want passive-aggressive? I’m _all_ aggressive. You’ll sleep with me as a favor? Maybe I was dumb and desperate when I was seventeen enough to go for it, but hey, fuck you for thinking I’m such a slut I need it so bad I’ll take any cock I can get.” She couldn’t bear it now that she imagined it, all too aware now of how distant and dispassionate he’d been that day. She couldn’t fuck him and see that it didn’t matter—that she didn’t matter.

She could see the exact moment he lost it, and that razor’s edge turned into something wild and fierce, like a summer storm suddenly turned from gentle rain to a brooding, gathering darkness right before the lightning strike, like the lightning in the arena that had transfixed her, burned her. “Sorry for trying to be kind if that’s not good enough for you. Sex doesn’t fucking _work_ for me anymore, all right?” he shouted. Something distant in her wondered if the walls were thin enough that whoever was in the next CPC over was hearing a real show, but given she hadn’t heard any noises from their neighbors, maybe not. And even if they were overheard, that wouldn’t have stopped her. Temper racing through her like wildfire, she had to give way to it or risk being burn by the force of it herself.

The instinctive move was to fling that in his face, mock him with it and push him away forcefully so she’d be safe. But honestly, it caught her aback enough that she stammered like an idiot, “You mean you can’t, uh…well, they say that when you drink too much…” Well, now _she_ felt like an ass, but confused at the same time. So maybe he’d only been offering to get her off.

“The equipment,” he said frostily, eyes still blazing hot enough to warn her to not laugh, “is perfectly fine, particularly since I quit drinking. There is no problem with me physically.” He said the words very precisely, to the point his twanging Twelve accent virtually disappeared as he enunciated them all very clearly, like teaching a lesson in speech to a small kid. “It’s that…” Now he obviously floundered. “I don’t know,” he muttered finally, accent back to its full glory and then some as it always seemed to be when he was upset. “I don’t know if I just locked it away deep somewhere and forgot where it was, or if all those patrons, all those years, maybe it burned it right out of me and it’s gone forever.” He looked somewhere in the vicinity of her jawline rather than her eyes, shoulders braced as if he was ready to take a punch. “There’s no ‘type’ that you’re not, Johanna. I just…don’t get a hankering for sex. Not with anyone. I haven’t felt like that for anyone in a real long time. Even with Tilly, it was more…wanting to feel something that could make me forget them, forget wanting to peel off all my own skin, than wanting her.”

That had been her and Finnick, even if she’d been too young and naïve them to realize it, and called it “love” so stupidly. “Oh.” Now she looked away, not disgusted by him, but instinctively trying to give him some privacy and a little dignity after that confession, sensing the embarrassment practically radiating from him in waves, like the anger had only moments before. Yeah, that made sense. He’d obviously felt nothing with her. Sex just didn’t matter to him anymore, and suddenly she hurt for him in a peculiar way, left so alone and hurt so much that whether he’d chosen to hide that part of himself or if they’d killed it, it seemed gone either way. “Yeah, OK.” She breathed in deep, closing her eyes. “I think I know…sort of what you mean. All those men, all those women, I never wanted…never wanted….” Now she was the one left lost in the woods, struggling for words.

“You never actually wanted _them_ ,” he supplied, voice strangely gentle in a way that pierced her in a way the anger never could, and her eyes stung a bit at it.

Never mind what all the tabloids said so luridly, no matter how everyone leered at what a slut she was, fucking around so casually. “It never mattered, not like that. It was just power, you know? Getting back at them and being in control.” 

“It wasn’t ever about desire.” He managed to put the word to that thing both of them were missing. Because now she could see that maybe they’d come at it differently, but they were alike beneath the skin, damaged to the point where sex had been something they both simply did, as meaningless as shitting or eating or scratching their nose. To be honest, she’d gotten more pleasure out a good meal than she had from fucking. “Me offering, that wasn’t about implying you couldn’t do without sex.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him, wanting to go to him in a way that had nothing to do with getting naked. “I get it now,” she acknowledged. He’d wanted to offer her the only kind of comfort either of them could easily accept anymore. She could fuck him far more easily than she could ask for a simple hug. “But I don’t want you to fuck me unless you actually want me,” she said, words coming out rough. “And I shouldn’t either, unless I want you. You, I mean, not…just using you because you’re convenient to make me feel better, or to forget something, or…” 

“Yeah. But no point worrying about that for now. For now we’re friends, nothing’s gonna change that.” He stepped in gracefully enough, acknowledging it and letting her stop fishing for the words, and she breathed a small sigh of relief. They stood there, at arms’ length, looking at each other. A faint smile twitched at the corners of his lips, and he cocked an eyebrow. “Married half an hour and we’ve already had our first fight. Ain’t that something?”

Now she could laugh at that, letting the good feeling of it drain the last of the anger and the anxiety. They’d figure it out, somehow. He was on her side. “You still want that nap?” She nodded towards the bed. “Figure we might as well try the whole bed-sharing thing before we have to manage it in front of the kids.” Somehow, without the tension of the whole sex question, assured that they could simply be friends, sharing a bed with him didn’t seem as much of a potential minefield. Sure, it would still be weird for a while, but she could relax about it.

He kicked off his shoes, stretching out on the far side of the bed, deliberately giving her some space, although it wasn’t much given the size of the bed. It was only a bit bigger than the single bed she’d had in the room she’d shared with Annie. The bed she’d slept alone in all those years out in Victors’ Glade was about half again as big, so big that she’d taken to sprawling out in it at night, limbs stretched out like the branches of some wide-spreading shade tree, simply so that it felt less empty and lonely. She wouldn’t have that same problem here, clearly. “I’ve stopped sleeping with a knife, don’t worry,” he said dryly, “so even if you steal all the covers it’ll be all right.” 

“Such a good husband,” she mocked him with a grin, lying down facing him and punching the sad, tired pillow into shape, trying to damp down the prickle of awareness of the sheer nearness of him and the tickle of his breath on her cheek, “letting me have all the covers.”

He smirked at her, though his eyes were too soft for it, looking at her with a kind of mingled affection and relief. “Yeah, well, put cold feet on my legs come winter, and all bets are off.”


	27. Chapter 27

Most of their circle in Eagle Mountain was part of the intelligence network, but Parthenia had made sure that when Nikoleta “went wandering” into the mountains to follow her husband who’d gone weeks ago, and she and Gnaeus decided it was time as well, that people heard about it and could say that if asked later by some of Snow’s spies. 

For them it was a falsehood, but it was a bad time this winter and more than a few folks actually had gone up into the mountains with the first snows to find a peaceful final sleep. The first people in Two to experience ration cuts over the last year were the elderly retired Peacekeepers, after all. She’d gotten soft in her years here compared to so long in Seven, and she could feel her own body wearing out slowly, bit by bit, as the rations cut further and further down.

Between that, the determination to see Johanna again, and the knowledge that it was better they find a safe hiding place again with the lid blowing off a lot of secrets, they’d agreed it was time to go to District Thirteen and keep running the network there.

So over the snow-dusted mountains they trudged along with Nikoleta, tired and cold, grimly seeing a few others along the way who were there solely to die on their terms. Nobody thought much about the elderly, since they were so rare out in the outer districts, but it seemed so pitiful that what shreds of dignity and pride remained to these people—that damn Two honor—would make them walk out into the winter rather than be a drain upon the system. They buried their dead out in the trees in Seven, but even a sickly, bedridden oldster could be left back in the winter town with the caretaker during the summer months, and people could go to the logging camps confident that even if that grandparent or great-uncle wasn’t the blood of the caretaker, they’d be well looked after. Meant sometimes people came home in the autumn and found the death happened months back and burial was long done. That had happened to her with her father Hans, years and years ago. 

Cold and miserable as the night was huddled in a cave, all of them over sixty now and feeling the cold for it, the next morning they met the hovercraft on the far side of Eagle Mountain, carrying some other refugees from Three and Six to boot. She was sixty-one years old and this was the first hovercraft ride of her life. Even when she and Gnaeus—no, Gunnar, he could be Gunnar again and she could be Petra, not Parthenia, not Rita—had gone to Two from their months of hiding in the woods near the winter town, they’d gone on the train, smuggled aboard. 

There were no windows in the passenger area. Even if there were, she wouldn’t have been staring out at the cloud-riddled sky, marveling at it like a child full of wonder at a snowfall and the world made new. Her thoughts were turned instead with an inward eye. 

Johanna, her Johanna; Rita—Petra—had given up all three of her children as lost eight years ago now. She’d had to do it. Bern was partly restored to her, she’d spoken to him now and again on the phone, but the things that could be said there were so limited. Plus he was in Eight now, a district fortified for war and closely watched, and that meant the phone calls had virtually stopped. As for Heike, she was in Twelve with the same wartime problem, but she also believed the woman she’d called “Nikoleta” when Magnolia told her that her younger daughter had her memory erased with tracker jacker venom.

That meant of the three children she’d borne, Johanna was the only one who she might have a chance of seeing now. The one she’d believed lost to her even before that August day when the Head Peacekeeper hid them away in the woods and staged their deaths. The one who’d never quite come back from the arena the same way, who’d pushed her mother away even more aggressively than before, and it was more than the usual teenage petulance of a daughter for a mother.

The one most like her, in truth; Johanna might have inherited that beautiful hair from Gunnar’s mother Kirsten, but those flashing brown eyes, the passionate nature, the impulsiveness, those were all Takala traits, not Mason. Maybe that was why they’d clashed so when Johanna was a teenager. Heike had Gunnar’s sweetness, and Bern had his affable charm, but Johanna was the tempestuous one, the assertive and stubborn one.

Johanna was fierce and stubborn enough to have survived the arena a second time, and to have stepped up and become the forefront of this rebellion, charging right into it and challenging President Snow, leading the fight, calling out the lies and kicking the rocks over to expose the dirty secrets. The mix of pride and fear at that told Petra that she’d never stopped being a mother, even with as deeply as she’d buried herself in the cover of a lifelong Peacekeeper who’d never raised a child.

And now her daughter had become someone unknown to her. Not the image she’d projected over the years. The anger, the urge to lash out and hurt someone: Petra had understood that. What she hadn’t fathomed was the exact nature of the pain behind it. That propo, and hearing everything Johanna had endured, nightmarish visions in her mind of it—yes, she was still a mother. She hurt for that every bit as much as she had when a tiny Johanna skinned her knee and cried. Gunnar might have been the one swearing and growling and threatening vengeance, but she was the one raging inside. _Nobody does that to my child. I wanted you to never know what that hurt was like._ The look she’d exchanged with Magnolia, sitting there on the other couch in the living room, told her more than enough—yes, Haymitch Abernathy’s mother had known that pain and shame as well, and now felt that same protective rage. Though Petra guessed it wasn’t from Phineas that Magnolia had learned it, she hadn’t asked. Nor had Magnolia asked her about it. Some things were respected between survivors of ordeals. She hadn’t spoken of it to anyone since Gunnar, all those years ago. She hadn’t told Johanna, for that matter. Maybe she should have.

Her daughter, her fierce, brave, and reckless daughter was now a woman, a mother herself, and getting married today. That much, Phineas had told Magnolia on his last phone call. The other woman’s quirky sense of humor meant she’d broken it to Petra as, _Well, looks like we’re family for real now, my Haymitch’s marrying your Johanna._

The details came later: done for the children and simply dealing with Thirteen’s rules, both of them seeming to make the plan in wordless agreement, though Plutarch Heavensbee would sell it to the public as a genuine romance. She liked Magnolia Fog, and she’d heard plenty about Haymitch Abernathy that let her see beyond the man on the television, but her loyalty to Johanna, first and foremost, was unquestioned. She didn’t know the real Haymitch enough to say, and perhaps Magnolia’s opinion was a bit colored by being his mother. She hadn’t seen him in twenty-five years, though. But she’d believe he was a steadfast friend to Johanna. That was something at least, her daughter wasn’t being forced to marry a stranger she didn’t like or respect. Though real or not real, when it came to the marriage, Haymitch had best treat Johanna right, or there would be hell to pay.

Her daughter was a woman now, passed onto that shore without her mother there to know her as it happened. She was the face of the rebellion. Her Hanna, with her thundercloud rages and her courage in defending people and her mischievous smiles—Petra could only hope she’d look at this Johanna and not see a total stranger staring at her with indifference, someone who neither needed her nor cared to have her around, who maybe blamed her for not being there during everything she’d had happen to her.

Gunnar’s hand crept over and held hers. “It’ll be all right,” he said softly. “We’ll be whatever she needs, yeah?”

“Oh, for crying in the woods,” she muttered crossly, hating still to be so easily read by him, even after thirty years of marriage. “The worst thing you should have to worry about on your child’s wedding day is disapproving of who they’re marrying.”

“Thanks, dear,” Magnolia returned, giving her a cheeky smile, “should I assume you approve?”

Eight years now this woman had been her best friend, the only one who understood what it was like to be the mother of a victor, ripped away from them, worrying from afar as they slowly seemed to destroy themselves. Glancing over at her, Petra caught the slight furrow of brow, the tension hidden behind that light, joking air. The sense was there of a line drawn by this marriage, and if the thing went sour, both of them would stand on opposite sides of it now. She didn’t have to say the obvious: Haymitch was a bit older than Johanna, known to be moody and a recovering alcoholic, though he seemed clear and sober and sharp according to Phin. Magnolia also didn’t have to reply with the obvious: Johanna’s notorious casual relationships with so many Capitolites, her own increasing drinking over the years, her sharp and readily-wielded anger. “If he can keep up with her,” she joked, and that defused the tension.

Magnolia acknowledged that with a nod. “It might be all about the kids today, but we have to get the reports, of course, first thing tomorrow.” 

Particularly given they had hopes of the first news from Three, Eight, and Twelve in a month, and the updates from their agents in the field would help direct any last-minute attacks before some of the districts became unavailable targets during the winter, that was worth their consideration, and she sensed all three of them were happy to turn to a more objective topic. Chances were Phineas, in Thirteen already, was buried in intel rather than fussing bout wedding plans, but that was Phin. He’d married Nola after his retirement as Head Peacekeeper well past fifty, hadn’t had the chance to be a father to his children in the same way as Gunnar, and she had the feeling that he still preferred for things to be clean and clear and rational rather than awkwardly emotional. Saving Magnolia and her younger son was probably his first genuine, conscious act of defiance—she had the feeling the longstanding relationship with Nola and his covering it up and going easy on the district had been a long series of small justifications. 

Still, if anyone would have told her ten years ago that her daughter would be a victor, and that she’d count numerous former Peacekeepers among her friends and sympathize with them, she’d had called them all damn crazy. Peacekeepers in Seven weren’t usually bad, but folks didn’t exactly make friends with them. There were boundaries, invisible though they were. The friendliest ones might joke with the lumberjacks, the poorest people might creep to Peacekeepers’ Row to hire their bodies out for the night during the winter months in particular, but the Peacekeepers were more or less a necessarily endured inconvenience at best, a bane at worst. They weren’t friends. They weren’t people who belonged. But she’d had to rethink all that. The world had needed to become much bigger a place than she could ever have imagined when she got to Two and took up a new life. At least she’d had Gunnar with her. She wasn’t sure she could have managed it without him there. She certainly couldn’t have managed without Magnolia either, so having both of them coming with her as this new journey began made her feel like she could withstand it without exploding into a defensive temper.

She had a moment’s pity for Magnolia, though. At least she only had eight years missing, and for a daughter, because there was always hope that mothers and daughters, after the rough teen years, could build that bond strong and tight as women. Perhaps in the end even Heike might have a place for her, even lacking her memories. But Magnolia’s sons had both been missing from her life for twenty-five years, grown from boyhood to middle-aged men without her, and so would either of them need her as a mother at all? Would Bern need her, when it came to that?

She couldn’t remember exactly what her last words to Johanna had been, that long-ago July morning. _We’ll see you soon_ maybe, something gentle and yet weightless as Johanna boarded the train. There had been only two saving graces to the day: Heike hadn’t been reaped as the female tribute, and Johanna had let Petra do her hair that morning, as she had the year before. That was the best it had been between them in a long time. Eleven months of alternate sullen silences and sudden bursts of rage, fierce shouts with hard, angry eyes of _Nope, I don’t want to talk about it_ and _You never were in there, you don’t know anything_. Johanna certainly took advantage of having her own room to shut herself up in it, or take long walks and wander back in just in time for dinner.

Petra wouldn’t say things between the two of them had been fantastic before Reaping Day of the 66th Games, but that was normal friction, annoying as it was. After that, Johanna shut them all out, and even Gunnar’s gentler attempts to get through to her were shut down decisively. They didn’t know, but she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell them, so how could they have anything but confused impressions based on the Johanna they’d known and the story the Capitol told the nation, trying as best they could to reconcile it all? They’d agreed to give Johanna space, that it was the trauma of the arena and the Games, that perhaps she was embarrassed that her fierce courage had failed her on Reaping Day.

She almost wished she’d pushed harder anyway, because even if Johanna had screamed it in rage then at her, Petra could have weathered that, and it would have been out in the open. The lies the Capitol told to turn her into a vicious murderer, the near-rape in the arena, all of it. Anger she could endure, but being shut out entirely hurt worse back then, and what had it cost Johanna to live alone with that burden all these years? Maybe Petra herself had been too timid, backing off in mingled frustration and the impulse to not cause further pain, and perhaps also to not be constantly undercut by Johanna’s flinging at them that none of them had endured the Games.

Three children she’d borne and raised—and for both her daughters, she couldn’t be sure that either of them would ever welcome her again. Phineas had said Johanna seemed eager to see them again after she got their letters, but maybe he was wrong. The world might be big enough, and her eyes open enough, to withstand whatever Johanna had towards her now, and whatever life Johanna had with all its changes and the shock of missing years. If the only way she could help her girl now was as an intelligence officer aiding the war that Johanna helped lead, so be it. _So long as she’s happy,_ she thought to herself, still holding Gunnar’s hand, though already steeling herself against the possibility of the worst. 

It would be right back to work tomorrow morning, but when the hovercraft landed and they exited into the hangar bay, it was Phineas waiting for them. That bucked up Nola’s spirits for sure, as she hurried to go hug him after the weeks apart, but Petra’s eyes were elsewhere, looking for Johanna. The fact she wasn’t there was more of a crushing blow than she’d ever let show on her face. Seven stoicism had been so helpful throughout her life, even with it coming married to a hot temper.

It was Gunnar who broached the question to Phin, after the man finally let Nola go and his own face relaxed from an expression of quiet joy. “Johanna?” he asked, after the handshakes and backslaps of greeting were all exchanged. His face was carefully neutral, but Petra could read the anxiety in the set of his body, the tense shoulders.

“She’s down below getting ready for the broadcast,” Phin replied, glancing at the three of them. Oddly, Petra appreciated he didn’t say _the wedding_ , given it was all apparently a splendid piece of propaganda. “Haymitch too.” Petra could almost sense Nola relaxing at those words as well. Phin gave a rueful smile. “Didn’t figure he had much use for his old absentee dad today, as ever, so I headed up here to meet you lot…”

“Phin,” Nola muttered crossly, shaking her head, and with that, he relented, gesturing for them to follow.

They headed deeper and deeper into the heart of District Thirteen. The whole system here would have done Eagle Mountain proper credit. She’d never been inside the military complex there, but she’d heard enough, and this warren of underground corridors and the grey-uniformed figures obviously there as guards struck a familiar enough chord to her experiences in Two. It must have been almost comfortingly familiar to someone like Phin who’d actually been a Peacekeeper. For her, born to towering forests and fresh air, going underground like this felt stifling, like the walls were closing in around her. She could smell the faintly artificial smell to the obviously recycled air, stale and slightly chemical. Looking over at Gunnar as they turned another corner, she could see it in him too. How the hell was Johanna surviving this? Same way she’d endured it all, and the same way Petra had survived those months in the woods, and then the years in Two—sheer grit in the face of necessity.

He paused in front of a door, and gestured Magnolia to it. “Well, here he is.” 

Petra reached out and grasped Magnolia’s hand for a moment, muttering quickly, “Good luck.” Nola answered that with a brief, wry smile, and knocked on the door. 

“Are you bothering me about all this color-representation crap because we both know my lovely bride doesn’t give a shit, Plutarch, and you somehow imagine I do? I still don’t care,” there came a lazy drawl from within, deliberately loud enough to be heard through the door, “though if you decorate the whole place with Twelve black, people might look at you a bit funny and ask who died. Now, nobody’s dead yet today, and I’d just as soon keep it that way.”

Gunnar turned to Petra and grinned. “I think I like him, at least a bit,” he joked.

“You would,” she muttered back, though she couldn’t help but smile a bit herself as Magnolia slipped inside the room, and she and Gunnar headed further down the hallway.

Phineas nodded to another door and then stepped aside, and Gunnar stepped forward and knocked. “Yeah, come in.” Her heart seemed to skip a beat as she heard Johanna’s voice—not over the television, but right there.

And there she was, turning to see who her visitor was. Petra had a moment to notice the indigo skirt and white blouse, the wool vest hung over the chair in bright lucky blue, the phoenix embroidery on it in red and gold and the embroidered flames lapping at the hem of the skirt echoed in the same colors. Then she dared to look up at Johanna’s face, and saw the astonishment there, and something that looked like actual pleasure. “They said you probably wouldn’t make it for another couple weeks,” she said, brows suddenly furrowed.

“Phineas decided we should move things up a bit and get us out of Two before Snow started possibly taking a good hard look at things after your latest victory there. Besides, we couldn’t miss our girl’s wedding, could we?” Gunnar answered. Gunnar, steady and rock-solid, who could dare to use the words _our girl_ in a way Petra never could in this moment. He never could seem to conceive of the brash, prickly temper and pride that his wife and his daughter shared, and what could set it off, and so when he did a thing like that, it could be brushed off as affection. From Petra, it probably would have been read as a challenge. Not for nothing had she made sure it was Gunnar that wrote the letter to Johanna that Phineas had carried along with him.

Johanna smiled at that, a quick, light smile as she’d always had for her father, and stepped forward, getting a bone-crushing hug from Gunnar for her pains. “Now,” he said apologetically, letting her go from his embrace but catching her hands in his instead, “I’d better not wrinkle your wedding dress, yeah?”

“Ah, hell, what are irons for anyway?” Johanna answered, laughing, her eyes only for him. “Could be worse, Plutarch was trying to gussy me up in this fancy silk dress, throw Haymitch in a tux, all this total fairy-tale stuff, and I told him that would go over _real_ well with a war on.” Gunnar chuckled in reply to that, and now Johanna’s eyes turned to her. “Hi, Mom,” she said quietly, and Gunnar let go. Petra waited, but Johanna was the one who reached out first without hesitation, and so she gratefully stepped forward and hugged her daughter again, wishing she’d never had to let her go, wishing she’d never have to let her go again. Then there was that stupid swell of emotions, really, threatening to choke her.

“Oh, for cryin’ in the woods, don’t get me sniveling all over your blouse either, I don’t want the camera crew screeching at me,” she muttered helplessly. She heard Johanna’s answering laugh at that, but neither of them let go.

“Think I’ll let you two have a few minutes,” Gunnar said, touching Petra on the shoulder as he passed. “We’ve put all the sharp objects away, yeah?”

“Dad, c’mon,” Johanna grumbled, and her voice was just a bit deeper than it had been, but it was so like her when she was a teenager that Petra couldn’t help but smile.

Then it was just the two of them alone, without the constantly-used buffer of Gunnar. Johanna sat down, gesturing Petra to the other chair. “Sorry, I figured it was that damn escort Effie Trinket again knocking on the door there—she’s become Plutarch and Cressida’s eager and efficient little assistant.” Her lips twitched in a smirk, her eyebrows rising. “She’s made it known—not to my face, of course—that she really preferred working with Katniss and Peeta. Katniss was your average sullen teenage brat sometimes, and Peeta, he’s almost too sweet to be real. Reminds me a lot of Dad. Now me, I’m a terrifying bitch at times, and well, as regards Haymitch…” She gave a wry grin at that. “She’s never liked him. Probably because he’s about three times as smart as her and he doesn’t give a crap about her protocols.”

Petra couldn’t help a sound of amusement at that, though it faded. Nervous, flippant jokes—was that all they had? One of them would have to bend first, and she was the mother here, so it would have to be her, painful as the vulnerability suddenly felt. “It’s good to see you again,” she offered.

“Yeah,” Johanna said, voice suddenly rough. “So, you’re a spy? A for-real spy?”

“Yeah. I know, you and I weren’t good at hiding things, all of Sawyer’s Creek knew when we were arguing.” She looked at Johanna, summing her nerve up. “Looks like we both got better at it out of necessity.”

Johanna nodded at that, looking down and away for a moment. “I…all the times I thought about it since, I probably should have told you what happened in the arena. I just…I was…I couldn’t tell Dad about that, and you…” The nervous rambling told Petra that Johanna had thought about it every bit as much as Petra had, and that for all the thinking and agonizing, the words still came no easier.

Aggressive, pushy, fierce Petra, who clashed with her too-alike daughter in those years, willful and brave even from the time she was a baby, but still able to make room for sweetness from her mother in her youth. But the teenaged child she'd been had angrily thrown off any attempts at gentleness as pandering, desperate to assert herself and run ahead to independence. “I didn’t know how to be sweet in the asking without hurting your pride,” she admitted. “Making you feel you were…” She didn’t want to say the word _broken_ or _damaged_ , but it hung there in the air between them, as if written in neon letters. 

“It might not have helped telling you anyway. You were already dealing with an angry, fucked-up kid who’d come back from killing people and the Capitol selling it as me being an adorable little psycho,” Johanna said, leaning back in the chair, crossing her leg with an ankle over her knee. “Almost getting raped by that asshole Clark was just the cherry on the shit sundae, and it would just have been dumping more crap on you.” Petra noticed the deeper golden tone of her skin, as if she’d somehow managed to get outdoors despite living in this place. That paleness on camera she’d had for years wasn’t due to makeup. She’d heard the reports from Seven. Johanna had apparently stayed indoors most of the time back in Seven. That thought hurt, given how Johanna was easily the most rough-and-tumble of the kids, the one who loved the outdoors the most. Easier to think of that than to think, as she had so many sleepless nights, of Johanna alone in that house, turning on everyone in her pain and chasing them away.

She closed her eyes for a moment. “The arena, no. But…the rest, at least, I maybe could have helped.”

A few moments of perfect stillness, and then a simple, neutral, “Mom?”

“We got married late, Gunnar and me.” Thirty when she’d married, and Gunnar was fully thirty-three, and that in a district where to be still single at twenty-one was unusual among the lumber families.

“Math was one of my best subjects, Mom. I noticed.”

“For him, I’d let him tell you all of it, but he loved another girl once. She got reaped for the Games when he was eighteen.” She glanced over at Johanna. No explanation needed there. The only Seven female victor wouldn’t have to ask. “He didn’t want anyone after that. And me…” She blew out her breath in a long sigh. “Me, I was fifteen.”

She wove the tale then, and over forty years had gone by but she could still remember the details like it was yesterday. Fifteen and so proud, her heart racing at the start of a courtship with Burl Lam, tall and handsome and seventeen. Drinking the spruce beer at his cousin’s wedding that autumn, getting a little tipsy as teenagers often did, dancing with him. The walk back, the mill shut down for the night where they sneaked in to steal a few kisses. Managing a single gasp of “No” before his lips crushed hers, his body crushed hers, and any fight or protest was stifled. Feeling a forgotten bit of scrap wood digging into her spine, hurting her there along with the hurt deep inside with each thrust, her entire world sick and dizzy and painful. Stumbling home and throwing up. Throwing away her torn underwear, wanting to deny it had happened, but feeling sick every time she saw Burl’s face. Denying it anyway until she started throwing up, hiding it as winter flu, desperately thinking what to do. Nature took care of it for her right after New Year’s, but the cramps and pain were terrifying, and her mom had figured it out. At least she had one person on her side from that, one person who believed her. But then came even worse than the rape—the blank, shocked look on Burl’s face. _C’mon, Petra, we were both stupid drunk! Don’t lie and make it something it wasn’t. You’ll ruin me and you’ll ruin yourself too, everyone’s gonna think you’re easy. We both got lucky you lost the baby, so don’t be a bitch about it._

No, she’d never regretted losing the baby. She wouldn’t have been able to look at its face and not remember. Besides, she was fifteen, and asking her parents to take in another child, particularly if she were reaped in the Games—all for the best, even as painful as it had been.

She’d told people the truth anyway, her rage burning so hot that she couldn’t keep it in. And they’d believed him—she was just some drunk slutty girl who cried wolf about it. And every boy that asked her out after that, she looked at his face, the half-concealed eagerness. All they wanted was a fuck. After all, she’d done it once already that they knew, so the reaping risk obviously didn’t bother her. She imagined each and every one of them pushing her down on the ground, telling her to not be a bitch about it. “I hated everyone,” she said, hearing the angry edge in her voice still, barely above a whisper. “The boys that wanted me because they figured I was eager for it now. The ones who called me a liar and talked behind my back. The girls who acted like I was dirty somehow. I hated all of them and all I let them see was how angry I was.” It was easier to be enraged than to wallow in her sick, dark sense of shame and humiliation, because if she sank down into that, she had a terror she’d never find her way back up. “So, you could say I was in no hurry to marry either.” At least all those years later her youthful “indiscretion” had been readily forgotten—some of her friends had reaping-age children by that point, and they were more concerned about that than old gossip. It didn’t hurt that she’d married up slightly either.

Johanna sat there, eyes wide, looking stunned. “Mom…”

Petra shrugged uncomfortably, not wanting it to turn into something awkward. “I should have told you then. But I didn’t think that it was important yet. And you weren’t dating…”

“No,” Johanna said dryly, “I’ve never been popular with the boys. At least, not for anything real.” She laughed darkly. “Fucking me, well, that’s another matter.”

Some part of her wanted to leave it alone, but the other part of her had to know what was going on. “I always thought Rhus had something for you, though. He just hadn’t said it yet. Did he ever—is that why you’re adopting his daughter?”

Johanna’s eyes were distant, looking inward. She smiled, but it was a sad, tired little smile. “When I look back on it now I think I’d picked up on some hints from him in the year since the Games, but after Clark he scared the shit out of me so I kept him at a distance.” Yeah, Petra could relate to that, recalling full well how she’d kept Gunnar at arms’ length. “But after you guys supposedly died, he marched up to the house and told me he loved me and he realized how short life could be.” She sighed, rubbing her eyes tiredly. “Him saying that, after what they did to me in the Capitol that summer—I hated him for wanting the girl I’d been. Knew he wouldn’t want me now. Not the whore they’d turned me into. So I laughed at him, tore him a new one, to make him go away.”

“You still love him?” The question slipped her lips before she could think better of it and acknowledge it was a deeply probing question to a daughter she hadn’t seen in years, but it was out there.

A sudden flash in Johanna’s eyes told Petra she’d felt the imposition, but tamped it back down. “No. Who I was then loved him. But he was a good man. And he, and Bud and Holly, died only because Snow knew we’d been close once and he didn’t have you and Dad and Bern left to kill, and he couldn’t kill Heike publicly without explaining how he’d lied back then. He had to turn to my old friends instead. Holly and Bud didn’t have kids, but Rhus did, and he’s got no relatives left. So I’m taking her. She’s a good kid. She deserves someone who can give her some of our ways, and tell her who her parents were.”

Well, that answered another question—it wasn’t just a cynical stunt that had made her adopt that little girl. Petra hadn’t thought so. The Johanna she’d known had that ferocious sense of caring as part of that heady brew of passion in her nature, but it was good to be certain.

One more question, and one as personal as the last, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Besides, she’d gauged enough of Johanna then, and now, to be aware that it was better to take the risk of immediate, fast-burning rage but still be respected for the daring in the long term. “And now, do you love Haymitch?”

An eyebrow rose at that. “Oh, for the love of—this is you walking right back into my life with the ‘Mom Disapproves’ act? Here’s some news. I’m twenty-six now. Even if you hadn’t been gone for years, I’m not a little kid.”

It wasn’t meant to offend. It wasn’t nearly heated or sharp enough to be intended for actual dismissal. Petra wanted to smile at the stubborn bravado of it, almost enjoying the challenge of Johanna asserting herself as an equal, but she could tell it would be taken as condescending. “Yeah, point taken.”

Johanna wasn’t done yet, clearly. “Besides, if you want to pick on something about my life choices, better to criticize me on my fucking my way around the Capitol for years now, yeah?”

She shrugged at that. “Me, I got my safety in scaring people off entirely. After what they did to you, you felt better controlling things that way.” Johanna’s eyes went wide again, staring at Petra. Whether it was the understanding or the lack of judgment or both, Petra didn’t know. “So, Haymitch,” she brought up again. Johanna avoided her eyes. “Sweetie,” and the old endearment rose so easily to her lips still, “it’s not me wanting to judge him. Magnolia Abernathy and I are good friends, all right? Your dad and I just want to know you’re happy. That this is your choice here.” She had to know exactly how much of this was Johanna’s choice versus pressure from outside forces, because if it was the latter, Phoenix be damned and Plutarch Heavensbee and all of it, she’d do whatever she could to keep Johanna from having to do yet another thing on someone’s say-so.

“He’s my friend,” Johanna said, tone almost defiant now, chin tipped up proudly in that familiar, stubborn gesture. “He’s been one of the few friends I’ve had since my Games. Probably the only one who didn’t judge or make it clear I was low on the priority list.” Petra’s heart ached hearing that, but she sat and listened anyway. “So he’s got problems—yeah, not like everybody doesn’t know I do. But he understands me. He accepts me. He isn’t going to expect things I can’t give him. And we cooked this up together, him and me. Maybe I wouldn’t be marrying him if not for the fucking rules here in Thirteen, but at least he’s the one man I can trust with the job.”

Not exactly love, but Petra hadn’t been Capitol enough to buy into that, even in her Seven days. She’d married late, older even than Johanna, and battered enough by circumstances to be cynical about spun-sugar dreams about true love. Passion might burn quick, but love was something that grew. Many a practical marriage was made in Seven, for survival or for the sake of kids. And her years in Two had her seeing that plenty of couples there ended up together based more on a foundation of respect and trust and hopefully friendship than some youthful romantic notions about giddy heart-stopping emotion. “Well, not that my say-so matters. But I’d rather see you with someone who respects you and looks out for you, however it turns out, than you saying ‘I know he’s a bad idea but I just can’t help myself’.” Particularly with kids on the line, at that—the idea of suddenly being a grandmother caught her aback. True, she probably would have come to it by now if things had gone differently. Chances were that all three of her children would have married by now.

Johanna must have thought of it as well, because her lips twitched up in another wry grin as she said, “Hey, you always did tell Bern I’d probably end up married before him. How is our ol’ Bear anyway?”

With Bern, what looked like a giddy flightiness flirting with the girls was really him trying to not tie himself down too young. She’d been aware her eldest held a gift, and hopes about making the jump from the lumber crews to the craftsmen. But his chances would be better if he could marry the daughter of one of their families, and if he remained unmarried, without the distractions of a wife and kids for the years of learning the trade. “He’s in Eight, you probably know that. Quite a talent for covert work, apparently. We haven’t heard for a few weeks, though.” 

“Haymitch’s dad told me that he got shot in the leg as a cover to send him to Two. And he spent his time there with Haymitch’s mom pretty much adopting him.” Johanna snickered. “Typical Bern, everyone meets him and loves him immediately.” There was an edge to the breezy pronouncement, though, and Petra sensed the lingering traces of an old resentment there. The middle child, the prickly, passionate one struggling to be noticed sandwiched between a charming older brother and a sweet-natured younger sister.

“It’s you they’re looking at now,” she replied.

“Oh, yeah, ‘The Phoenix’,” Johanna said, rolling her eyes and framing the words with a gesture of her crooked fingers. “Honestly, people are fighting for themselves, not for me. So I think they’re gonna need me less and less for camera crap as time goes on. Can’t say I’m sorry for it.” She shrugged. “Though I admit for the time being, the Almighty Phoenix card it does come in handy as leverage with President Coin’s got herself all in a pucker about something.”

“Can’t say I’m sorry for it either if they let you retire gracefully.” Whatever might keep her safer, less pulled and used by the demands of others, Petra couldn’t regret. Not being in the public eye would make her less of a target. “But still…” The sight of Johanna on television, alight with righteous passion, saying all the things that everyone had needed to stifle for so long, had filled her with such a wonder and pride. But maybe even more than that, it was hearing about adopting Belinda Amsell that told her the kind of person Johanna Mason was. _My daughter._ She was scarred, but not broken, it seemed, and now fighting with all the strength she possessed. Fighting not only for her sake either—the girl she’d been had become a formidable woman, one who not only leaped to lead the charge and inspire people with her courage, but to do something so human and personal as protect a vulnerable orphaned child and take on that responsibility. Whatever the Games and the rape and all of it had done, they hadn’t destroyed her. If anything, Petra suspected Johanna only fought all the harder now, knowing better what she went to war to achieve.

If Haymitch Abernathy was her partner in that, all to the good, and she had the feeling he was someone who was that bright and quick-tongued and someone who clearly enjoyed the challenge of crossing words, was someone could keep up with her and not stifle her. For her, Gunnar’s steadiness and charming affability came along at the right time, first as a friend and then later as a lover. He was what she had needed, more restful and a better support for her to grow than a verbal sparring partner would have been. But similar as they might have been in some ways, Johanna wasn’t simply Petra, copied over again. She was her own woman. Seeing that so clearly now made her feel the rush of affection all the stronger.

As mawkish as the words were, as easily as Johanna could still angrily reject them as not needing their approval, she felt they needed to be said. “Your father and I…we’re so proud of you. Not the Phoenix, you know. You.”

“Oh, hell,” Johanna muttered, pushing up to her feet and coming over, and Petra managed to get up just as Johanna half-tackled her with a fierce hug. “I swear if you tell anyone you made me cry, Mom…especially Bern.”

“Our secret,” she promised, holding her close, eyes closed in relief. The missing years couldn’t be returned, but hopefully they could begin anew. With luck, Bern would be restored to her too, and she couldn’t give up hopes about Heike—they were trying to safeguard her in Twelve as much as they could, and have the agents recruit her to the cause if possible. Better that poor Heike be told now what had been done to her and the risk Snow posed to her, rather than wander vulnerably through the war. “You’ll have to let me meet the grandkids, right?”

“Sure. They’ll love having grandparents. And Haymitch’s dad really doesn’t know what to do with them, poor guy. He obviously hasn’t been around little kids.” Johanna’s laugh had a hitch in it that sounded suspiciously like a sniffle. “But if Dad lost a girl in the Games and still managed to find you later…maybe he and Peeta should have a talk.” Petra just let her talk, sensing she needed it, but she filed the idea away for later. Truth be told, Haymitch wasn’t exactly a sterling example of how to move past epic loss—not entirely his fault, but the poor boy really did need someone whose life hadn’t been so traumatically constrained to reassure him. Gunnar could at least provide that. And perhaps it might do him some good to talk about her—Brigitta. He never had after telling Petra the once, probably respecting that the second love might not be deeply threatened by the first, lost one, but it didn’t help to hear about them constantly. “So I’d ask you to do my hair for the wedding, but it’s so damn short now.”

Her heart lifted just that little bit more at the gesture offered, recognizing the meaning behind it. She reached up and touched the shoulder-length strands of Johanna’s hair, copper and auburn and bronze and deep loam brown. “Oh, I’ve managed a good portion of a spy network, sweetie, and you’ve managed to set a president running scared. So I think we can figure something out with your hair, don’t you?”


	28. Chapter 28

The journey from Two was easier in some ways as the journey there had been, full twenty-five years ago now. At least this time Magnolia—already she was cautioning herself to not think of herself as Nikoleta, and it wasn’t an easy retraining to do—wasn’t having to abandon everything and remake herself entirely anew. True, she was leaving behind friends, but most of them were in the network with her, even if they didn’t know the full truth about Haymitch, so they took her leaving with good grace.

She was going towards her husband again, and with hopes of regaining one son. Even Ash, there were hopes, despite his memory loss courtesy of the Capitol. Gary—Bern—dammit, it was difficult to keep it all straight now and unwrap all the layers of necessary lies. Bern was in Eight and it sounded like Ash was quickly coming around to their side. That told her plenty about her younger son. Take his memories and indoctrinate him into the Peacekeeper Corps they might, but they couldn’t take that sharp mind of his that liked to dabble in all the deep questions, the whys and hows and the rights and wrongs of it all. He’d always been all about the reasons, Ash. She could easily believe that even now, he could see the truth of things, particularly when informed just what the Capitol had done to him.

But Ash was a worry for another day. Today was about Haymitch, and all at once the hovercraft ride seemed far too quick and not nearly long enough, and there she was in Thirteen, this odd, colorless place. Phin was there, though, giving her a warm hug of greeting, and she closed her eyes in gratitude for that, holding him close. She’d let him go not knowing when she’d see him again, if at all, so for it to be so short compared to the last time she’d had to part from him, let alone compared to her sons, put her at ease.

He smelled different, though: a harshly chemical soap, and the lack of that familiar spice-and-fruit tobacco of his. She saw the grumpy lines etched around his mouth and sensed he hadn’t had the easiest time here. “Command or Haymitch?” she muttered to him as they walked, not sure which answer she wanted. The leadership being a difficulty made everything just that much worse, but hearing that the man she loved and her son were sharply at cross-purposes wouldn’t be much better, if any. Granted, Phin had told her plenty over the telephone and assured her that things were fine enough with Haymitch, but she’d taken that all with more than a grain of salt given she imagined he was talking with others nearby.

“Leadership,” Phin assured her dryly, “the boy and I get along well enough.” She glanced over to see his mouth twitch up in a smile, easing the lines of strain. “Not that we’re going to go father-son fishing anytime soon, Nola, but he got over being irritated that he can’t resent me pretty quick.”

“Oh, good,” she answered softly, keeping her voice pitched low enough that the grey-clad figures walking the halls wouldn’t hear her, or even Petra and Gunnar a few steps back. Dear friends they might be, but they had their own child to worry about right now, and frankly, given that their kids were getting married today, she’d just as soon keep her business away from the Masons. She could hope like hell it never came to a situation where the line had to be drawn, but if it did, family necessarily came before friendship, no matter how sustaining it had been to her these last eight years to have another woman, a victor’s mother, who shared that exact same pain.

They walked past what looked like a repurposed meeting hall, red and gold streamers and the like draped across the walls and hanging from the ceiling.

Then Phin stopped and gestured to one of the doors. “Well, here he is,” he said, waving a hand at it. 

Petra caught Nola’s hand for a moment. “Good luck,” she said, giving Nola a worried, sympathetic glance from those wide brown eyes.

“Thanks,” she acknowledged, knocking and bracing herself. Twenty-five years—she’d had weeks to prepare, but it never could have prepared her for this. Her son, and getting married, adopting kids too, and in her head the last true thing she had was him at sixteen, well-meaning and kind but sometimes a little too clever and sharp for his own good to cover it, a child who’d come back from that hellhole of an arena stripped of all his pretensions of being strong, grown up. He’d been a frightened, traumatized child in that single week she’d had him back after the Capitol gone done with him, a child who screamed in the night and let her comfort him as he hadn’t since he was only six or so and stubbornly insisted _he_ should look after _her_ because he was old enough now. 

She’d left a scared teenaged boy behind her in the hardest time of his life, and in her absence, she’d missed so much. He was forty-one now, suddenly a husband and father now, long since forced early into manhood and burdens he never should have had to bear, and certainly not alone. He’d lived far more of his life without her than with her, and when she thought of that it seemed faintly ridiculous to imagine he wanted her there, let alone needed her at all. She’d never had a daughter, but at least with a girl perhaps there would have been some place for her in his life. Petra Mason had more hopes there. As for Magnolia, chances were she was twenty years too late to mean anything to Haymitch anymore. Not to mention the secrets she’d kept from him all those years, letting him think she was the saint who went to the Head Peacekeeper solely out of necessity. She’d hidden the truth because he was too young to understand it all, and she didn’t want him doing anything stupid like attacking Phin in his rage. 

His passive-aggressive move of provoking Phin when he was twelve had been bad enough. Walking out of the woods right in front of the Peacekeepers with a pheasant in hand so they couldn’t ignore it or pretend—he wasn’t so stupid or careless, it had to have been deliberate. She loved Haymitch, but she’d heard his resentful remarks about Phineas Fog, and she believed Phin’s read of the situation. Haymitch had hoped to bring down some kind of punishment that would make her loathe the man who’d ordered it so much she’d refuse to have anything to do with him again.

 _I won’t be a kid forever,_ he’d promised her bitterly. _I’ll look after you, Ma, you know that._

Lies and twisted truths were all she’d given him, because she was afraid. Haymitch’s fierce sense of justice wouldn’t respect at that age that the deck was stacked against him and Phin’s hand was forced to boot. Clever he might have been, but whatever tactics he chose, they’d find him out, or else punish everyone for it. So that night after the flogging she’d soothed him, fed him some willow bark tea, and told him, _He won’t be here forever, just remember that._ Her heart had twisted at the reminder that Phin would be gone in a few years, and so would Haymitch too—he’d grow up, marry, move on. _Don’t you do anything rash. Not for me._

The twelve-year-old couldn’t have comprehended it all. Even the sixteen-year-old—no, he was so young still. She could only hope the grown man who’d been used, abused, and forced into complicity in the lies of others could somehow forgive the fact that his own mother had misled him all those years. If he couldn’t, she wouldn’t blame him. He’d been forced to bear too much pain already and stagger onward as best he could. If this was the thing that made him say “No more”, one more betrayal, at least she’d know for sure.

The lazily called words came through the door, the Twelve twang so familiar that it made her smile and hurt at the same time to hear it, “Are you bothering me about all this color-representation crap because we both know my lovely bride doesn’t give a shit, Plutarch, and you somehow imagine I do? I still don’t care, though if you decorate the whole place with Twelve black, people might look at you a bit funny and ask who died. Now, nobody’s dead yet today, and I’d just as soon keep it that way.”

She heard Gunnar’s faint snicker. “I think I like him, at least a bit,” he joked.

“You would,” Petra muttered back, as Nola slipped in the door, shutting it behind her.

There he was, her eldest son, immediate and real right in front of her, not just a figure on television. Her eyes roamed for a moment, because suddenly she didn’t want to look at his face as he saw her. Taking in his clothing—crisp white shirt untucked, the dark trousers, the grey vest with its faint blue pinstripes and the red and blue silk tie thrown carelessly on the table beside a pair of dark socks. 

Pacing around the room barefoot, like any Twelve child who didn’t want to wear out their shoes and thus kicked them off right inside the house, and ran around in summer without if at all possible. Acting in old ways, as if he was still wearing old shoes with cracked and scuffed uppers, held together with tape and a prayer, instead of the new, shiny shoes there on the floor.

Dark mirrors they were, like looking into a fresh face of anthracite. Shoes that probably had some fancy style name in the Capitol that she didn’t know.

“We’re not gonna win this war with cake, so how about you actually ask me something useful?” he said impatiently, raking a hand through his dark hair, riotously curly as ever, though the traces of grey here and there were new to her. Then he turned and his eyes went wide as if he’d seen a ghost.

She had the advantage of having seen him on television all those years. As for her, she was older, a little age-stooped and wrinkled. She’d gone totally grey now, hair shorter than it had been in those years where she’d tamed her own curls as best she could into a practical bun. True, she’d sent that picture of her and Phin, but even that was a couple years old, and he wasn’t expecting her today.

And yet she could see it on his face, unable to look away in that moment. He knew her immediately. He recovered from the shock quicker than she’d have expected. “Hi, Ma,” he said softly, gruffly.

He’d gotten so big since she’d seen him last. Granted, even at sixteen he’d been probably five inches taller than her already, but he’d had that skinny teenage frame, all knobby wrists and too-long limbs, one that he could never eat enough to keep up with his growth. She’d been there on Tour Day down in Eagle Mountain last winter, but she deliberately hadn’t gotten close to him at all, and he’d been there muffled up in his big coat and a thick scarf. So close to him, he practically loomed over her. He must be nearly six feet, nearly a foot taller than her, and she’d judge even a couple inches taller than Phin in his prime. That frame too had filled out into this powerful, broad-chested, broad-shouldered study man’s build that was familiar to her. There he was, and the reality of it stunned her as powerfully as it did him. “Hi, son,” she returned, daring to use the word, wishing already she’d managed to say something better.

He looked at her intently then, cocking his head aside slightly, and those grey eyes went from startled and confused to a sort of intent, inquisitive look. “You’re weeks early here—is everything all right?” Then his brows knit together. “Oh, shit. Did you have to get out in a hurry? Was it Snow making a move after we got the kids back? I’d guess you brought Johanna’s ma and pa with you, but are Ash and Heike OK? Snow’s gotta know where they are, but…nah, really, he can’t make a public spectacle of that? Not without showing he’s an even bigger lying, manipulating bastard than they already know by admitting he faked their deaths and kept them alive solely as bait. No purpose to it, is there?”

He’d made those leaps of logic so swiftly and easily it caught her aback, running through the whole idea and then casually dismissing it in mere seconds. “Ash and Heike are both fine,” she assured him, “or at least, last report we heard. And yeah, Petra and Gunnar came out with me. They’ll be with Johanna now.”

“Good,” he said, mustering a faint smile. “She’ll be happy to see ‘em.” _And you?_ she thought silently, but couldn’t bear to say. 

That tension grew, more and more awful, and both of them just sort of stared, staying barely out of arms’ reach. She tried to not let her heart sink too much. Had she expected an enthusiastic, childishly happy greeting? And yet, he hadn’t dismissed her yet. “Would you mind awfully,” she finally ventured, afraid to ask but needing to know where it all stood, “or are you too old now for a hug from your ma?”

It was the look in his eyes that told her. There was a flicker of surprise warring with relief, then yielding to a look of mute appeal. She’d had her boys and their hugs in all those years, even if she huddled up in her bed alone, wishing it didn’t have to be that way. But she’d seen that look on so many faces, right from her own young years going up to the Row for some much-needed coins to keep the pantry from emptiness for another week. Peacekeepers, stripped of anything intimate and human. They’d been married solely to duty when they were barely more than children and held by that union until it finally left them high up the mountain of years, already into middle age and floundering with it because they’d had no lovers, no close friends, not ones that they could ever keep. Doing their best, and many of them making a decent bargain of it, but those young Peacekeepers in the field, the retired ones who came to Burnt Tree, they all had that same anxious look, desperate to be touched and acknowledged, but not knowing how anymore. When she was young herself, she’d interpreted it as fear of being caught or sheer embarrassment at hiring her body, or nervousness at sexual clumsiness. She hadn’t had the perspective yet.

Phin had worn that look in their early days when he let his guard slip, and it was the first crack she’d seen in the armor of that implacable uniform, let her finally see that he was just a lonely man underneath it all. When she’d seen that and quickly understood that it was dinner and conversation and even a brief hug that he wanted more than impersonal sex, it was dangerous knowledge that had opened up her mind in frightening ways.

Haymitch had been sixteen when she had to leave, smuggled away from him, not much younger than those Peacekeeper boys. Since then, who had been the people who’d touched him? There had been nobody at home who cared, that much was certain. All he’d had were years of people who paid for his body, who hurt and humiliated him, and the rest was probably an awful, aching span of loneliness, plus the guilty shame of it all. 

He’d looked at her as if he was shocked that she wanted to touch him, and then painfully, desperately grateful for it, and her eyes stung a bit as she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him, clinging to him tight, feeling him hold her in return.

If only he was six years old again, crying over some small hurt, and she could soothe it away with a hug and a precious spoonful of blueberry jam. But this was something little comforts couldn’t erase, and maybe not even time itself. Still, he was here, and he’d let her hug him, and dammit, she was trying her best to not cry for all he’d endured, silent and alone.

And then either she was crying or getting close to it because he patted her clumsily on the back and said, “Ma, hey, I’m all right. No need to get all this fretting for my sake.”

“Oh, let _someone_ worry about you for once,” she said, sharper than she’d intended but unable to help it, “you always thought everything was your responsibility even when you were so little and you haven’t changed one bit on that, have you?”

“Ah…” His eyebrows rose again, and he looked lost for words. But then he recovered rapidly, cheeky smile in place, leaning one hip against the table. “Well, so we’ve gotten the lecture done, but seeing as I was too old for a good hiding even then, I’m safe now for sure.”

In spite of herself she laughed. “I mean it, though,” she said, glancing at him and willing him to listen, not simply hear it and brush it off with a witty quip. “Even back then all you worried about was how you could look out for me, or Ash. Working for Callum when you were eight, then out in the woods that same year, taking out tesserae the moment you could. The only thing you ever let you have for your sake was when you took up with…”

Dammit, and now she’d stepped right onto a mine, and the moment she moved it might well explode. “Briar,” he supplied neatly, toneless enough that she could read nothing at all from it.

“Briar,” she echoed, heart twisting now with the pain of Phin’s news, but how much more must it hurt for Haymitch, having been there when she died? In her mind, it was so much easier to see Apollonia, the bright, lively woman she’d lived with as a neighbor and an adopted daughter for the last several years, the woman who’d adored Rube and been adored in turn, than to remember the skinny, underfed teenager who Haymitch had adored so utterly. He’d have done anything for Briar too, come to think of that, but at least Briar would have done the same for him, so it wasn’t all about responsibility and sacrifice in the way it was for her and Ash.

“Well, at least she was happy for a time with him.” His eyes met hers. “She was, wasn’t she?” That look of his wouldn’t permit any lie, so it was all to the good she didn’t have to do so. Somehow she sensed he’d much rather hear she’d loved and been joyful in it rather than miserably pining for him all those years. 

“She was happy with Rubius, yes.” The only mar on the Rackhams’ happiness had been their failure to have kids, but maybe that was better now, given the orphans already left by this war, and there would be more. “Did she suffer?”

“She clipped an artery and she probably wasn’t feeling much pretty quick thanks to the shock,” at her look of surprise he explained, “they’ve had me training as a medic.” His lips pressed together tightly for a moment. “She didn’t go immediately, no, but I doubt it hurt much. Seen a lot worse deaths in the Games.” 

Those words, dark and brooding, hung uncomfortably in the air, and searching for another topic, she asked, “Did you still love her?” It was a rash question to ask, particularly on his wedding day to another woman, but she asked it anyway.

“Ma,” he said, shaking his head impatiently, “hell, I wish it _had_ been me so in love with Briar I couldn’t even look at anyone else. There’s a kind of peace to that. Easier by far than knowing any woman I took up with might well get killed if Snow decided I needed another lesson. I ain’t worth that risk to any woman.”

He said it all so matter-of-fact, as if it didn’t weight on him at all, but she could see by the tension in him that it was simple defense. So it had been guilt and fear, not love, binding him to Briar’s memory. She wasn’t sure whether that made things easier or not. _Ain’t_ , he’d said, present tense, still applicable, not _wasn’t_ , and that told her far too much. He must have seen the look on her face because he gave an acerbic bark of laughter, crossing his arms over his chest. “Johanna and me, we both figured if you’ve got to marry, might as well make it to someone who’s already under a death sentence in their own right. Pure romance, hey?”

She wanted to flinch, hearing the casual cynicism and furious at the world that had made him so. He’d always been a little mouthy, sometimes a bit glib too, but it had been high spirits back then underlying his snarky remarks. But instead she managed to look back at him steadily. “Well, there’s something to be said when you’re carrying that kind of weight for being with someone you don’t have to hide from, and who’s right there beside you in the elevator going down the mine, as it were.”

A spark of interest on his face helped the casually jaded expression there vanish. “You and him…all those years.” A wry, reluctant smile came over him now. “Conducting your own little treason there long before I decided to fuck around with a forcefield, yeah?” 

Now they were stepping back into dangerous territory. She’d promised him in her letter that she owed him an explanation, and here the time had arrived. “I…maybe I should have told you. All those years you thinking I was some perfect martyr.”

He must have seen something on her face, because he waved a hand to halt her. “Wasn’t meant as a criticism.” From the awkward look on his face, she realized he’d been trying to tease her. “Ma, no apologies to me. Your life was shitty enough. I expect even with him there, you’d have got hitched again after Da—after Blair died if anyone asked—and they didn’t. Says enough.”

“Not many people coming asking for a Westie widow who’d been whoring out to make ends meet ever since she was fifteen,” she said bleakly. “Blair was all I could get even then.” Before she’d had a child, which would have dissuaded other men, but she wouldn’t say so to the child in question. “They’d all trust me as a crew captain, but they didn’t want to bring me into the family, see.” It became quickly clear as the other widows and widowers remarried that she’d be left alone in that rush to the altar. Not that she’d been surprised.

Haymitch nodded, chest rising and falling abruptly in a sharp, heaving sigh. “Don’t have to tell me how things work in Twelve,” he reminded her dryly. “I was too young then to get it. I’d have ended up doing something stupid, most like. Not that I didn’t try even then. Nah, you were smart. Even when I was sixteen I wouldn’t have taken it well.”

“I planned to tell you when Phin left Twelve.” When her lover was safely away, and her eighteen-year-old son would be heading out on his own, so if Haymitch hated her, at least it wouldn’t be years of living under the same roof with that smoldering resentment. “And then I thought after the Games I’d tell you sooner, but I couldn’t tell you then. Not with what the Capitol had just done to you.” And the Peacekeepers there as the enforcement arm of the Capitol—no, it was impossible. He’d needed her then, desperate and wounded as he was, not for Magnolia to suddenly unburden herself to him. 

“Thought about it a lot after he told me what happened, Ma. Now, I could see it being where he was so obsessed with you that he saved your life only to bind you closer, and of course he would have had cause to save his own son. But two things don’t match up on that. A man with that much to risk would do it all quietly. He doesn’t go insane enough to call President Snow direct and spill his guts to beg for mercy, and he doesn’t also save a girl who’s meaningless to him, not when he could have easily let her die and it wouldn’t raise too many questions.” He shrugged slightly. “So that leaves me with it being just what he said it was. I’ve had my weeks to wrap my head around the notion.” Haymitch took a cautious step closer, stretching out a hand and lightly touching her on the arm, careful as if he were touching a hot stove and not sure whether he’d be burned. “All you need to tell me is that honestly, he made you as happy as he could then, and he’s made you happy since.” 

Her fears seemed stupid now. But maybe she’d clung to the child he’d been for so long, unable to see him as anything but that young boy, with his still-fierce emotions and naïve, narrow experiences. She couldn’t have imagined this: the grown man, calmer and wiser, able to accept that sometimes the best life could offer was sometimes not pure happiness, but only the route of least pain. Her throat felt too tight for words for a moment, but she nodded, and the stricture loosened as she swallowed. “I’ve been happy with him, and he’s been good to me. He always was.”

“Then I’m glad you finally got to have him.”

“It was always one or the other, though,” she felt compelled to confess it. “I could never have all of it.” She’d so hated some other women in her day, blissfully unaware of the ordinary privilege of a complete family. “Back then, I had you boys with me, but I couldn’t have him. Then I could have Phin, but I’d lost you and Ash.”

He paused then, as if thinking, or gathering himself up for something. “I can’t speak for Ash. But…I’m here. For as long as you want me around. For whatever that’s worth.”

“A lot.”

He smiled sheepishly, ducking his head slightly, avoiding her eyes. “Ah. Maybe going to him was no sacrifice, but all those years of pretending, and we were so damn poor, and I know they looked down on you. Life wasn’t ever easy for you in those days.”

She looked at him, shaking her head in a fond exasperation. “Well, I suppose you get it from both of us,” she muttered.

“Huh?”

“Me, selling myself from the time I was fifteen to keep food on the table and medicine to ease my pa’s dying, and Phin, spending almost all his life being told all he was good for was being one little piece in the greater purpose of serving the nation.” She shook her head in exaggerated amazement. “Sorry, son. You’ve got two parents like that, it’s probably in the blood. No wonder you never think much about what you owe yourself.” He’d worry about whether Briar was happy, about whether Magnolia was happy, but never himself.

 _Owe yourself._ She’d never quite gotten over Seam thinking, had she? How long had she felt the raging guilt over simply loving someone, trying to figure it all out against her notions of what she supposedly owed everyone else? He looked startled at the idea. She took a slow breath in, trying to gather her thoughts up. “Phin was the first thing I had in my life that was just for me. And it changed a lot. Before that, I wasn’t much, didn’t think I should ever have much. Wasn’t just Blair that did a number on me.” Dirt-poor west Seam, dead ma and a pa hacking his lungs out slowly, selling herself to merchies and Peacekeepers to make ends meet—the kind of girl that only a community home boy who loved drink and fight too much could want. “I could have lived only for you, and then for Ash too. I didn’t, and I’m glad of it. I watched other men and women break themselves like that. I needed him too, because he could look out for me in a way a child couldn’t—even though you wanted to and I know you tried. What little I had of Phin, it was enough that it kept me going through the worst days. Kids are a different kind of love, sweetheart. It’s wonderful, but it’s never…”

“It’s never equal,” he answered, voice soft and a little distant. “Yeah, I saw that. You always give a lot more than you get.”

“You’ve figured that out in only a week of fatherhood?” she teased him gently.

Something flickered across his face, a shadow of pain she wished she could take away. “I wouldn’t say I was their pa, but Katniss and Peeta…neither of ‘em exactly had what you’d call ‘reliable families’. They’d end up coming to me now and again anyway.”

His grief for Katniss Everdeen was almost a tangible thing. The fact that she’d been the daughter of Haymitch’s childhood friend—long since dead down in the mines, Magnolia had heard that last Games—had to make it all the worse. “But you looked out for them.”

“Much as they’d let me, and best I could in between getting drunk,” he said, tone flippant, but eyes downcast. “I quit drinking here in Thirteen,” he offered gingerly, as if afraid she’d chastise him for the booze. “They made me do it, mind, but…the shrink and I, we’ve been…”

“You’re not Blair,” she said, somehow sensing he genuinely needed to hear that.

“Considering I’ve actually killed people, not much comparison,” he answered her flatly.

“Ever smack a kid or a woman while you were drunk?” 

He gave a snort of amusement. “I punched a Peacekeeper once when I was drunk. Got flogged for it, and I figured out then how easy I got it from Fog—Phineas—dammit, Ma, _I ain’t_ calling him ‘Pa’. Anyway, he was pawing Owny Hillyer’s little sister Aggie—she was fourteen, fifteen?”

“So I’m assuming that’s a ‘no’. If anything, you locked yourself in that damn house and avoided everyone. Ever kill someone you didn’t have to kill? The arena, this war, those have all been about defending yourself against people who’d kill you.”

“Ma,” he muttered, obviously getting annoyed now, reaching for his socks as an obvious distraction and tugging them on.

“Haymitch,” she returned in the exact same tone. “Obviously you still need a talking-to sometimes for you to have a little sense.”

“Hey, I missed twenty-five years of it,” he said, pausing in shrugging on the vest with a smirk and a twinkle in his eye, and that was good to see, it was better than the awkward embarrassment.

“So, here’s some advice. It’s your wedding day, and you’re taking on kids too. You’ll do your wife and your kids better by admitting you’ve got the right to want to be happy along with worrying about them. It ain’t selfish. It’s just sane.”

Speech delivered, feeling awkwardly mawkish, she couldn’t help but press one more time. “I know you’re doing this for the kids, but fair’s fair—I told you he was good to me. Now tell me she’ll be good to you.” She’d be the last to criticize a young woman with the image of being slutty, because Magnolia was well aware of what truths could underlie gossip and rumor. And Haymitch had always been drawn to sassy types who were smart and strong enough to keep up with him. But Johanna was a ferocious little thing, and beneath that snark of Haymitch’s, he cared too damn much. He always had, and if Johanna Mason was the careless type—she just didn’t want to see him hurt more, sacrifice more, and get nothing in return. 

Surprisingly, he looked at her directly then. “She gets it, Ma. She’s maybe the one person who does. Neither of us is the people we’d have wanted to be, but we’re working on it. She’s come a long way already. And what you see on those propos, that’s real enough—she cares, and she’s gutsy. Maybe I don’t love her, and she doesn’t love me, but we’re close enough friends that it doesn’t have to be all hearts and flowers to mean something. And I think we’ll be happier than we have been in a long time.”

There was a sort of stark, quiet dignity to the words as he defended Johanna that spoke to their truth far more than tongue-in-cheek quips or even romantic protests could have. And it was obvious he’d been unhappy so long. If anything could ease that for him, even a little, it was worth him having it.

Maybe it was all her period of denial and confusion with Phin long ago, calling it gratitude and necessity and so many other things. Maybe motherhood and the wisdom of years helped too, and it certainly didn’t hurt to realize with painful relief that though he was changed, older and sadder and wiser, he wasn’t so changed that she couldn’t so easily see the echoes of the boy he’d been in the man there before her. But smart as he clearly still was, Haymitch obviously couldn’t see some things. Although she had to remind herself he’d been brought so low for so long, and before that, there had been nothing for most of his life. He’d experienced only that teenager’s first love with Briar, that first fierce burst of passion for someone coming into his life, looking at them and seeing something there that pulled him. He’d loved Briar passionately, but no time to find out if it could go the distance in the harsh light of adult reality. Sometimes that first love lasted, and sometimes it didn’t, and sometimes people spent their lives looking for nothing but a long string of comet-bright passions, overwhelming but quickly burned out. The moon was a gentler light, and sometimes it shone far brighter than others, but it was reliable, steady, a constant guide day by day rather than a singular awe-inspiring flash, there and then gone. That was love, rather than being in love.

The boy he’d been wouldn’t have known how to tie that necktie, but the man did it neatly, thoughtlessly. “Any other advice to catch up on?” he said, some humor entering back into his voice as he pulled the knot up, adjusting his collar around it.

One more thing, and this was likely one he truly needed to hear. Living out in Twelve where everyone lived hard and died young gave a certain outlook. It was Two that had shown her otherwise. “Phin was almost thirty-nine when I first took up with him. And I was already thirty-nine when I had to go to Two and learn a whole new life, forty-one when I got to marry him. Out there in Two, they don’t even get to retire until thirty-eight, and then they have to figure out how to have a life of their own. Plenty of them just sign up for another tour, or sit exams for Head Peacekeeper, just so they don’t have to face that. No, you’re not young. But your life ain’t over.” She stepped in, gripped him lightly by the arms, willing him to listen and take it to heart. “Take it from me—marrying at forty-one isn’t too late.” The moment hung between them, suddenly a little too heavy, so she couldn’t resist teasing him lightly, “And trust me, if you think you’re too old for her, remember, Phin’s about fifteen years older than me too. Maybe I was old for my age, and I expect your Johanna is too, but never had any complaints about him acting too old, or being able to keep up with me.”

“Ma,” he groaned, shaking his head and shutting his eyes with a grimace, “when I can’t drown it with a drink, making me think about you and him, that’s just cruel.” But a reluctant chuckle came next, and she relaxed, certain that the humor to end her little speech had done more than telling him earnestly would have done.

“So tell me about the kids,” she urged, hungry to keep him talking about anything, but eager too to hear about the four children she could now hope she’d be able to claim as a grandma.

He smiled slightly. “Well, you’ve at least seen Peeta on television a bi…”

There was a call from the hallway then. “Haymitch, Johanna, the camera crew’s due to start in five minutes, and we really do need our happy couple…” A Capitol woman’s voice, one that made Magnolia think of a bright, nervous little bird.

“Oh for…Effie, you must be beside yourself with joy about with the love for scheduling everything here. The world won’t end if the wedding starts two minutes after the hour,” there came a lower grumble that was clearly Johanna. Magnolia slanted a glance back at Haymitch rapidly enough to see the quick, amused smile that passed over him.

“Well, let’s get the show started,” he said, adjusting his tie down just a fraction and patting down the front of his vest, holding the door open for her with a polite gesture. He touched her shoulder as she passed. “Glad you’re here,” he said quietly.

Stepping out into the hall, she saw Petra and Gunnar flanking Johanna, dressed neatly in her skirt and jacket, hair tidily done up with combs. A woman in drab grey, her head wrapped in a scarf that recalled Eight’s women to her, but she was too pale-skinned, and this must be the Capitol woman whose voice she’d heard, and the plump, rapidly greying man with remarkable pale blue eyes beside her, she didn’t recognize. Phin was there by her side too. He must have been waiting outside the door for her, probably anxious as to whether it would go well, and Magnolia reached out and squeezed his hand softly, letting him know it was all right.

“Ah, hi, Mrs. Abernathy—shit, sorry, Mrs. Fog,” Johanna said, giving her a slight wave.

Haymitch nodded to Petra and Gunnar, equally awkward. “Mrs. Mason. Mister Mason.”

“Plutarch Heavensbee,” the other man announced cheerfully. “So glad you could make it for the wedding. Effie, I’m thinking of course the children should all be feat—“

“No, Plutarch,” Johanna said abruptly, and Magnolia watched her take a step in front of her parents as if to protect them. Well enough for Petra, but given Gunnar still towered over her, it would have been slightly laughable if not for the intense glitter of Johanna’s eyes, the determined set of her jaw, and the memory that although Johanna might be only a few inches over five feet, she’d proved herself a fighter more than once. 

At the same time, Haymitch had instinctively done the same, and having a son ten inches taller to peer around in order to see what was going on was a slight nuisance, but she’d long since lost youthful impatience enough to push him aside or demand to know what was going on. The best thing to do would be observe and figure it out. “We gave in on the wedding because you supported us on adopting the kids,” Haymitch said, voice soft but there was an edge there that set her on alert, “but they’re not going to be interviewed, or whatever you had planned.”

“Don’t tell me you’re thinking of putting our parents on for the happy occasion too?” From the look on Plutarch’s face, Magnolia had the sense the man had at least considered it. “Genius! Not that I want to hide them, but hey, let’s put three people Snow thinks he executed _on camera_ and let the world know they’re not dead.”

“We’ve rubbed enough victories in his face lately and we’re already waiting for the fallout. Besides, you think Heike and Ash wouldn’t be dead five minutes later? Maybe the victors he has prisoner too, now that they’re getting less useful?”

They worked easily together as a team, she’d give them that, and it surprised her how swiftly they managed it. “And the kids have been through enough already in the last weeks, they don’t need to be tricked out for a propo,” Johanna insisted, her eyes narrowing to cat-like slits. “

“I agree that the girls are too young, and the younger boy…well, people don’t know him either. But we really should get a few photos of you as a family.”

“Fine,” Johanna agreed, making it obvious she begrudged it.

“But Peeta should eventually give some kind of statement, though,” Plutarch protested. “He can’t just disappear. People will wonder. They need to see he’s OK.”

“What’s he gonna say?” Haymitch said, throwing a hand out in an irritated gesture. “He’s lost his girl, lost the baby she was supposedly carrying, lost his family, lost his other leg, and it’s all so sad, but everyone should keep fighting so they don’t risk losing it all like he did? You really want to make him into the poor heartbroken crippled grieving orphan for the rest of his life? He made that cake for today, so go ahead and get some pictures of him with that and that’ll help show people he’s not crazy or rotting away in a hospital bed. But you helped approve me and Johanna as his guardians, and he’s underage. Right now he needs to work on getting better, and that means any plans you have about him, you run by us. And right now, and I imagine Johanna agrees, we’re saying ‘no’.”

“He said it,” Johanna said with a casual shrug, but a slight smile that might have been amusement or pride curled her lips.

Whatever concerns Magnolia had about him too hurt by everything, unable to muster any kind of passion, obviously she’d been wrong. They’d talked carefully and fondly and calmly, the two of them, as two adults with so many missing years might. There had been a flicker of intensity in how he defended Johanna’s reputation, but this here was a full-on, ferocious protective assault. But then, Peeta had been there in Haymitch’s life first, and a seventeen-year-old boy who’d just lost his girl and his family, a victor the public expected to see—yes, all too easily to imagine Haymitch saw himself there, and that he might fight hardest there.

He sounded like a father. Now she was the one unable to help a proud smile for that fact. 

“Did I hear you mention cake, Haymitch?” Gunnar said cheerfully. Ah, Gunnar, and she was grateful to him right them. In the years she’d known him, he’d always been one with flawless instincts for where a seemingly innocuous comment would break up the bristling tension, like a perfect strike on a coal face. And amiable as he seemed, nobody ever questioned him doing it.

“Yeah, Peeta made us a cake,” Haymitch acknowledged, giving a grateful glance to Gunnar that told Magnolia he recognized it too. “I don’t know how many forms he had to sign, and how many guards he probably had to have to use the ingredients and the kitchen, but damned if he didn’t do it.”

With that, he stepped up and offered an arm to Johanna. “So, ready?” he asked.

“Oh, wedding round two, why not?”

“Should we look for wedding round three as the lucky charm?”

“May the odds be ever in our favor,” Johanna chirped in a Capitol accent as she took his arm, and Haymitch let out a bark of laughter at that. Effie, the Capitol woman, gave an exasperated sigh.

She squeezed Phin’s hand again and now let it go, catching Petra’s nod to her and heading over as they all proceeded down the hallway. Phin caught Gunnar, and it sounded like they picked up the thread of an existing conversation—so maybe Gunnar had waited out in the hall a bit, as Phin had, while the mothers talked with their kids.

“All’s well?” she asked her friend in a low voice, glancing over at her and seeing her expression and gaze more relaxed than they’d been on the way here.

“As well as can be,” Petra acknowledged. “She’s not my little girl anymore, but she’s still Johanna. I think we’ll be OK.”

Well, that said it about as well as could be said. “Same with Haymitch.” She could try to let go of the teenage boy, abandoned and frightened, that she’d carried around with guilt for all these years, and care instead for the formidable man he’d still become. “I think he’s halfway towards loving her already.” It was a risk, admitting that when she hadn’t even said it to Haymitch, but he clearly didn’t get it yet. Even if she couldn’t pretend Petra’s primary loyalty wouldn’t be to Johanna, it was something of a request, not a warning. _Make sure she treats him kindly._

Petra was silent for a moment. “So she’s not alone in that.” She grinned wryly. “She about bit my head off defending him. Called him just a friend, but, well…she obviously cares about him.”

“Don’t push it.”

Petra’s eyebrows rose, the very picture of wounded innocence. “Me?”

“Oh, you push. You mean well, but you do.” It was one thing she had in common with Johanna, Magnolia suspected. 

“And you meddle,” Petra fired back. All right, Magnolia would give her that one.

“Fine. We’ll be busy enough with the intel anyway, so we both stay out of it and let them figure it out when they’re ready for it, if it’s meant to happen. They’ve had it rough enough that they’re probably scared to death anyway.”

Petra nodded at that, a grim expression on her face. “At least…well, at least I’ve finally got one of them back.”

“Yeah.” She had her son back, and that was an unexpected blessing, especially so soon after losing Apollonia. She wouldn’t expect Ash back too—she could only hope for it. She could only hope too that Bern would make it back as well, given how she still cared for the eldest Mason child. It wasn’t too hard to imagine she’d come to care for Johanna easily as well, though, particularly if Haymitch cared for her too.

But those, and the war, were problems for another day. She’d try to simply not worry, not analyze everything ahead, and be happy that today, she’d regained a son and reunited with her husband, and apparently would gain a daughter and grandchildren as well. She wouldn’t question her good fortune, wouldn’t demand more when she already had far more than she ever had in her life, and invite losing it. Petra slipped an arm around her shoulders for a moment, just a quick press and then she let go. “C’mon, let’s get some of that cake—been years since I had any.”


	29. Chapter 29

Today was his wedding day, again. At least as weddings went, it wasn’t at all the overblown, lavish, ridiculous spectacle that it could have been—like what the Capitol had wanted to inflict on Katniss and Peeta. Haymitch tried not to dwell on that notion too much, but it stuck in his mind anyway, like a stubborn splinter. It may not have been what they’d wanted, but he could see them slowly getting closer and closer, in an ever-tightening spiral, and it wasn’t just the pretense of play-romance. They’d have found their way in time, even if he would have regretted that external forces had applied some of the pressure to make it happen. Still, others had endured worse in marriages of necessity.

They would have been married by now, had the Quell not happened. He wasn’t sure whether they’d have brought him back to the Capitol for the Quell. The previous Quell victor, true, and the mentor of the Capitol’s darlings, and there had been his remarkable resurgence in popularity and the secret, stomach-churning dread that somehow, some man or woman who’d fucked him before would take a second look and decide that he’d found a new appeal in his middle age. He’d spent long nights that winter trying to steel himself again to the possibility, gather together the threadbare remnants of what mental protection he’d woven over the years to ready himself for it again, make his performance flawless and instinctive—they’d want him grateful that they found him desirable again, witty and snarky without being arrogantly cutting as he had been as a younger man, the sharp-tongued rake softened by age and love for his two charges. 

They’d probably have dragged him to the Capitol for the wedding, some interviews about the Quell, and maybe a few patrons who’d take a chance on him again. But by this time, he’d have been sitting back in Twelve, probably doing his best to help the newlyweds pick up the shattered pieces of everything. Not as if Snow would wait long after the wedding night to start pimping those two out—maybe he wouldn’t have even waited that long. There had likely been some perverts drooling, simply hoping the two of them were still virgins.

So there would have been that, and their first losses as mentors. Victors of the previous Games, doubly so, and victor of the previous Quell in a double-tribute situation—whatever unlucky kids got reaped would have been targets for the Careers from the gong. 

That life that should have been, had things not altered course, still felt more vivid sometimes than the one he was living. The life where they were all at war and he looked and saw Peeta in a wheelchair and a blank space where Katniss wasn’t, where the three kids beside Peeta were his now, where his ma and his father were alive and his brother out there somewhere too, and where he danced a slow waltz in what amounted to a steel box carefully dressed up in banners and streamers to hide its bleakness, and held a woman who’d been his friend and his exasperation both and now become his wife, a woman who he’d already let in far too close and let her openly see all the ugliness and cracks and darkness. He couldn’t have imagined any of this eight months ago. It would have seemed too delusional.

“Happiness” wasn’t exactly the right word, despite his ma’s firm urging that he ought to actually think about that for once. “Scared shitless” might come closer. Everything was changing so quickly now, after so many years of stagnation and eventual resignation. He realized how tightly he was holding Johanna’s hand when she squeezed back just as hard, and for just a moment he looked at her and the smile slipped, and those wide eyes, lined brightly with eyepaint in the colors of glowing coals thanks to Cressida, looked as frightened as he felt.

One last turn, and Johanna spoke up loudly enough for the crowd and the cameras to hear, “All right, let me kick these shoes off for a few, huh?” A ripple of laughter answered that—the humble Phoenix and her rueful smile. He led her over to their chairs near a large bowl of apple cider and Peeta’s spice cake. He hadn’t gone for a direct fire or phoenix theme, for which Haymitch was grateful. Chances were it held echoes of Katniss for him. Instead he’d decorated the cake with the hues of flame, but done as autumn leaves swirling across the cake, like the fierce riot of color that greeted them when they went for their surface walks, now often accompanied by the kids. A nice nod to Johanna’s Seven heritage there, and it was thoughtful, characteristic of Peeta.

She did actually kick off her dark leather heels. “They’re too stiff and a little too narrow,” she muttered with a sigh, flexing and stretching her feet out, encased in dark stockings. “Best Plutarch could get here on short notice.”

“Not like he can just call up Eight and order a pair,” he said wryly as she reached down and massaged her feet for a second, motion furtive as if she was just straightening the shoes down on the floor. He wondered for a moment if he ought to tell her to prop her feet up in his lap and take over. That would be the adorably loving husband thing to do, right? He glanced over at her. “You want me to…”

“Nah, I’m good,” she said hastily, glancing aside, tucking her feet back under the chair as if to hide them from him, reaching for her glass of cider.

Well, that settled that. He’d kissed her at the end of the vows, of course—fairly generic vows so as to make them universal, rather than the ones from Twelve that he’d heard time after time as a kid, or whatever Seven had to offer. She’d kissed him back, and both of them did a good job faking tender enthusiasm for the camera, and at least it wasn’t as awful as it had been all those years ago with her so damn scared. He wouldn’t say he’d felt _nothing_ , exactly, as he had then. It wasn’t giddy excitement, or the blossoming of passion, like it had been so many years ago with Briar. But it wasn’t misery and humiliation and barely-suppressed panic either at a forced act that so much weighed upon, which he’d feared when Coin put them in this position. More just a feeling of relief that it was her, rather than anyone else, and ferocious as she was, he’d seen the kindness now that she’d buried in bitter rage all those years, and she wouldn’t expect too much of him he couldn’t give her, or mock him for the lack. Cameras and spectators and the nation all watching, and he’d had to fuck on camera in his day too and that had been far worse than feigning romance for a woman he esteemed and cared for as his friend, but at least in this he felt not so alone. He had one person he could rely upon.

“I think we deserve some more cake,” she said, slanting him a mischievous grin. “It’s out wedding day, and Peeta did such a good job.”

He didn’t have to try to smile in return as he rose from his chair and went to pluck two more plates of cake from where they waited, coming back and handing one to Johanna. Coin was probably tearing her hair out at this ration-buster of a day, but the cake and cider had to be finished up pretty quickly, and he would enjoy flaunting it a little and eating as much cake as he damn well felt like.

Though that notion got interrupted when Lindy hurried over and climbed up into his lap before Vick got there to retrieve her, cuddling close to him and knitting her tiny fingers into the fabric of his vest. “Me! I want cake!”

“Uh…” Vick said, looking the very picture of awkward apology, reaching out to take hold of her, Posy right on his heels.

“Nah, ki—Vick, I’ve got her,” Haymitch said, wrapping an arm around Lindy, though the wriggling quickly subsided as she settled against him with a little sigh, reaching out with his hankie to swipe carefully at the bright orange smear of frosting already beside her mouth. Well, seemed at least one of the four liked him in an uncomplicated sort of way. Though she was so little, so vulnerable…it made him imagine all the ways she could be hurt. “Ah, c’mere, all of you should get some more cake. Yeah, you too, Peeta.” He gestured to Peeta too, hanging out behind the refreshments table.

Thirteen would say they didn’t need the calories, and maybe they were rounder than they’d likely been back home, but to hell with that. They could all use the happiness and comfort of it today, so far as he was concerned. 

It wasn’t until he looked up and saw the camera and Effie and Cressida beaming that he realized that they must have been loving the hell out of it and figured he did it deliberately, and suddenly the whole thing felt a bit cheapened.

Well, he wasn’t a kid anymore by any means. Not like he clung to the illusion that anything came without some kind of price. He just concentrated on his cake, arm still around Lindy as she ate hers as well. Her fine dark brown hair, a molasses-like shade deeper than Johanna’s and reminding him of Ash’s, was caught up in two pigtails with flame-colored ribbons, curling at the ends.

With his frazzled nerves and the daunting prospect of the future, hell yes, he wanted a drink, but not as badly as he had some days. Maybe that was progress. Finally the cake and cider were done, the dancing concluded—nobody who wasn’t in the room would ever know it was recorded music—and the schedule on his arm, now covered by the clean white shirt, informed him that he and Johanna were due for one of their three-times-weekly sessions in the CPC. 

Back in Twelve there would have been some teasingly bawdy remarks made as the couple headed off to their wedding night, and from Johanna’s comments, it would have been even more so in Seven. People would have stayed for hours yet, danced, flirted, and lingered, some of them eventually to go for a stroll back to their homes together, maybe a few to sneak some privacy somewhere secluded. The good mood caused that kind of languor, not wanting to let it fade back to the everyday harshness of their lives.

Here, everyone quietly disappeared in an almost eerie unison, driven by their own schedule and whatever came after their presumed scheduled orders to attend “1930—Abernathy-Mason Wedding”, written on their arms. He wondered wryly if they’d been ordered to appear happy as well. “We’ll help get ‘em back to the cubicle,” Fog said, gesturing to the kids. He had the feeling that while Fog was as clueless as him still when it came to kids, at least he was trying, and the other three, newly-arrived grandparents would be over the moon at the chance to meet them and spend some time before bed. 

“Yeah, thanks,” he acknowledged, well aware that Fog probably wanted to get reacquainted with his own wife, given their weeks apart. Looking at the two of them, it was nothing as obviously melodramatic as Fog pinning her to a wall and kissing her in greeting, but he could see the subtle ways they now relaxed with the other one there, how close they stood, the way they instinctively turned to each other and the little touches and glances and smiles. That spoke to their being two inseparable parts of a single whole in a long-term love than any movie-style kiss ever could. He’d faked passion often enough, after all.

His ma gave him a smile as she passed, her hand on his shoulder, and even the Masons didn’t look at him like he was some old dirty bastard who didn’t deserve their daughter. Well, that was something.

When they arrived and used their access card, CPC 8 looked exactly like CPC 14, and CPC 3, and CPC 9—the exact same layout, same small bed, same red-numbered countdown, same small shower and toilet in the corner.

Johanna sat down on the bed, dropping the shoes by the foot of it. Even from the look of distaste on her face at them, she didn’t kick them or fling them. Old ways, there—the mentality of someone who’d probably frequently only had one or maybe two pairs of shoes as a kid, as he had, and had quickly learned better than to mistreat them. She tugged off the stockings as well and dropped them on the nightstand, and he could see the reddened patches on her bare feet as she flexed her toes, probably going to rise to blisters at the pressure points at the edge of her pinky toe, her heel, the ball of her foot.

Foot crossed over her knee, though the mid-calf skirt was more than long enough that it modestly draped over her open lap, she rubbed at the sore spots again. “Fucking shoes,” she said, shaking her head as he slipped off his own shoes and sat beside her.

“Yep,” he agreed tersely, tugging off his own socks and checking the rising blisters on the backs of his heels. Stiff, new leather—he’d felt it happening as they danced, but he’d kept going. Not the worst thing he’d endured for the sake of a show. “Sad, ain’t it, that we could go out to the fight and all that running and riding and whatnot, and it’s _dress shoes_ that kill us?”

“War wounds,” she replied mockingly, elbowing him lightly in the arm. He glanced down at her hand, still rubbing her foot. The delicate tendrils of the burn scars had faded from her hands and forearms long ago, but he still recalled them there, and the sight of her sitting there on the floor of the hovercraft, retching and dizzy and helpless.

No, let that go, he decided, trying to shut the door on the memory as firmly as he could. That moment, or that point where she stood alone above the body of a boy from Two as the sole survivor, or that long-ago day when they’d fucked because of it being the least bad option for her, or all those times they’d drunk together and snarked together and said anything but anything real—any moment like that, it wasn’t who she was. She’d survived all of it, and more, and here she was now, fighting and perhaps better than she’d been in years. He ought to feel the admiration at that rather than dwelling on the worst parts, drowning in them—life was finally moving forward now, ready or not, and he’d best try to find a way to move with it rather than circling back over and over on things done and unable to be helped. Aurelius had harped on that, but maybe he wasn’t wrong. Haymitch had gotten nowhere but the bottom of a bottle in despair by lingering on past failures and deeds.

“Things OK with your folks?” he asked carefully, leaning back against the wall with a sigh, head tipped back and hands resting loosely on his thighs, enjoying the sensation of simply relaxing with nobody to answer to for it.

“I think it’ll be OK,” she answered, and he caught more than a flicker of relief in her voice at it. “You?”

He couldn’t help a snort of amusement. “Oh, I’ve had to learn to deal with much worse than my ma telling me some fibs when I was a kid. Besides—he’s the one who kept her alive, and you and I both know plenty about the need to keep things all hush. Think we’ll be OK too.” He actually could believe that. All the years, all the grief and guilt couldn’t be taken back, but there, as elsewhere, he could try to move on with it. At least he had something to be happy about in this case. She was alive, and she wasn’t embarrassed by him. She’d been about as nervous as him, and he’d seen that straight off. In a way, it helped to realize she was as afraid of his judgment as he was of hers. No telling exactly where it would go between them now, but she’d neither overstepped nor shrunk away from him, and that was a relief. He could think of his ma now without the awkward anguish of before, instead replaced with something that he might almost have called contentment. 

Briar—that was a wound in its own way, but it was a pale fire of grief at the loss of the friend he might have had again, not a raging inferno as it had been for so long. He had loved her so damn much then it still caught his breath to remember that he could feel that way, so completely, but that boy was long gone now. It had been guilt and fear rather than memory of love that had bound him to her all these years. He’d mourn her in his private way, but Apollonia was no ghost to stand between whatever the hell he and Johanna might build from this day on.

And that was all that needed between him and Johanna as explanation. She’d be all right with her folks, and he was still working on things with Fog, but both of them seemed to have tacitly agreed that Haymitch was too old to directly need a father, and Fog was far too old to suddenly act like one, but treating him kindly like an uncle or the like was acceptable to them both. Thankfully, the old Peacekeeper hadn’t wanted a long chat about everything and Haymitch thanking him tearfully and all of that crap.

“Well, Boggs gave me the heads-up on the sly. Our honeymoon’s probably gonna be deployment to Milltown in Nine. They think me simply gracing them with my mighty Phoenix presence could turn the tide there.” She snickered softly, but then sobered. “Guess we’d better get at that one before the snows come.”

He turned it over in his head, reconciling it all with the last info he’d gotten from Fog and meetings with Coin. Ten, Eleven, and the rest of Nine were all mostly taken already. Eight and Twelve were still too fortified, and he’d heard Coin’s derisive dismissal of them as low priorities to boot. Lyme and her troops were now causing a ruckus in northern Two. One, Three, Five, and Six were too dangerous yet, too close to the Capitol. Seven was well on its way, and they’d planned to hit the district center in midwinter when the Capitol was lulled into complacency. Four—well, Four was a mixed bag, and he had the feeling they’d focus hard there next to really stick it to the Capitol by stealing one of its pet Career districts away. “Yeah, if we don’t take Milltown soon…”

“We go hungry this winter,” she said grimly. Clover had reported that all of Panem’s flour and grains were processed in the mills of Milltown, and it wasn’t welcome news for any of them. If the Capitol controlled not only the mills but the stockpile in the warehouses there, it would be a long, hungry winter for the rebellion. As Clover remarked in exasperation, they couldn’t just chew on raw grain all winter long.

“It’s gonna be a tough battle there,” he answered her, still not opening his eyes. “Like I told Coin months back, I don’t think we’ve got enough soldiers ready for a full-on frontal assault like that. The raider groups have been where it’s at to this point. And the Capitol will be fighting just as hard to keep Milltown.” If they lost the grain supply, the slow starvation would begin in the Capitol, its allies, and its remaining vassal districts, so he had the feeling the fighting would be fierce and bloody. “Johanna…” He tried to find the words, how to tell her that even the bloodbaths of the arena or the swift and deadly raids they’d been on probably wouldn’t be preparation for this. His mind tried to paint the picture of the potential carnage ahead, but it was too difficult. While he’d seen more than his share of slaughter in his years and could say with certainty that the dead wouldn’t be handfuls or even a couple dozen, but probably coming in hundreds, actually visualizing war and death on such a nightmare scale was beyond him. And frankly, the idea that he was still capable of being shocked by death scared the hell out of him.

“What?” It was barely more than a whisper.

“Stay alive, huh?” The words sounded too glib, but it was the only way he could think to tell her that he needed her alive—not for the war and the propos. For the kids too now, and her parents who’d just gotten her back, and of course she had to survive for their sakes. But he wished it now for himself too, because even while trying to wrap his tired brain around the notion of wide-scale slaughter, it was the thought of that singular death that haunted him. He couldn’t bear to lose her, and he opened his eyes and turned his head, looking over at her to see her looking back at him.

“Yeah. You too.” They looked at each other for a few long moments, and he wasn’t sure what to say, but he couldn’t look away either, caught by her gaze like a fish on a hook. Finally she broke the tension of it by quipping, “Let’s face it, you’re the one more liable to do something idiotically self-sacrificing.”

He scoffed at that, but her joking words did the trick and things between them transitioned right into a comfortable, familiar ease. “You’re the one more liable to do something recklessly brave, so let’s call it even.”

The rest of their time there passed quickly, and the obnoxious alarm chimed to let them know they had fifteen minutes left to shower, dress, and strip and remake the bed. If they’d been naked and sweaty and utterly caught up in each other, it would have been one hell of a buzzkill to the lovemaking. As was, Johanna just sighed, pushing up to her hands and knees and scooting over the mattress, wasting no time padding over to the small shower corner. There was a curtain, though the fact it was a more or less transparent grey plastic meant it was only to keep water contained rather than for privacy. Still, what need for modesty around someone a person had supposedly just got done fucking? The toilet was utterly exposed for the same reason.

He’d wryly noted on his schedule that on CPC nights, presuming he showered here, “Bathing” was eliminated for him, and instead he got all of five minutes for “Shaving/Oral Hygiene” and then “Family Bathing”, to help the kids wash up. Shaving at night meant when he got up in the morning the stubble was back in full force anyway, dark as he was. The CPC also assumed very helpfully that a couple showered together, and so trying to hurry and get enough water for two very brief showers was a chore. But they had their routine by now. She took the first shower.

Given her brazen flaunting of her body before, maybe some people would have found it odd that he turned his back while she stripped. But he was well aware what lay at the root of that supposed exhibitionism. So if he had to put a word to it, he’d say it was respect that made him turn away, giving her back the right to her body as well as he could in this situation. As the water turned on behind him, he stripped the bed, crumpled the sheets and blanket into a ball, and shoved it down the laundry hatch, and pulled a clean set of sheets and a blanket from the cupboard set in the wall next to the hatch. At least throwing it down the hatch it all went to communal laundry, where Coin hopefully couldn’t ask people about whether the sheets from the blissful newlyweds were sex-soiled or not. 

By the time he put the clean, folded sheets down on the mattress, the water had already turned off behind him. Johanna would make the bed while he showered. He waited for the grumble of, “All yours,” and turned to see her standing there, padding towards the bed with her damp hair clinging to her neck, wrapped in a grey towel that wasn’t quite long enough to wrap around all of her broad-hipped, deep-chested, ample-busted frame. He didn’t stare, turning towards the shower himself, quickly stripping without any of the languid, teasing art he’d learned in so many Capitol bedrooms.

“Five minutes,” Johanna warned him just as he finished rinsing the last of the soap off his skin and shut down the water.

“Once this war’s over I’m taking a hot shower as long as I like,” he groused, wrapping the towel around his waist—not quite big enough there either, leaving a gap all the way up his thigh. “And I swear these are fucking kitchen towels.” He headed for his clothes, not looking towards her as he heard the swishing, rustling sounds of her clothing as she got dressed again, trusting that she’d keep her back turned as well.

She laughed at that. “Yeah, well, in their mind, there’s no need for you to cover up what I’m supposed to be seeing—and getting hands on with too—three times a week, lover.”

“Oh, only _hands_ on?” he joked, doing up his shirt. “I don’t know what sex education they’re giving in Seven, but you’re not getting knocked up that way, darlin’.” 

“Wait, you mean whacking off won’t make me go blind?” A low, throaty laugh and she went on, “Shit, I’d have been a goner by the time I was sixteen, let alone now.”

It took him a second to realize exactly what she meant by “whacking off”, unfamiliar with that bit of Seven slang. He also noticed she didn’t say _by the time of my Games_. He didn’t say it either. He’d figured that day years back that she was no stranger to a good orgasm, even if she clearly hadn’t had another person do it to her before. No judgment there, of course. He’d certainly done more than his share of jerking off as a sexually frustrated teenager, and if anything he’d been glad she wasn’t innocent as a baby. It would have made him feel like he was violating her, even if it was by her request. And, well, he could speak to the early years, where he ached for something that was far more than sex, but a few moments of solitary physical pleasure had to suffice in lieu of someone to talk to, to laugh with, to hold at night, in the years before even that small spark of desire left him. Instead, he stuffed the tie in the pocket of his vest, not bothering to do it up again, leaving the top couple buttons of the shirt undone as well. “What do you think all those teen boys asking for bathroom breaks in school were doing?” He grinned ruefully. “That age, pretty much _anything_ that gets your pulse up, good or bad, makes you hard. The mere existence of girls, girls in tight sweaters, an extra bread roll at lunch, geology exams—you walk around for a few years really hoping you ain’t in a pair of trousers you’re outgrowing enough for them to be embarrassingly tight.” He actually recalled those years now with a rueful humor. Lucky for him he hadn’t grown that much, or that fast, until the Capitol injected him with growth drugs, and by that point, he could certainly afford any trousers he wanted.

She laughed hard enough to lean up against the wall, clutching her ribs and eyes closed, shaking with the force of it. “You’d stumble across boys hiding behind a tree, especially around dinner time, trust me.”

“Damn thing has a mind of its own when you’re that young. It’s like a puppy, getting all excited and jumping up at anything no matter how much you yell at it.”

“If you’re going with the ‘cocks are like dogs’ comparison, apparently then by the time you’re an old fart then it’s like that ancient dog that just lays there and doesn’t get up no matter how much you plead, and even if you pet it, you might get a twitch or two but that’s it.”

“Some things just wear out.” He wasn’t that old by any means, and as he’d defensively told her, it wasn’t that his cock didn’t work, more like he lacked the motivation to want to put in the effort. But right now, he felt far more akin to the oldster’s weariness than the young pup’s excitement. In his case the comparison was more like the wary dog that wanted nothing more than to be left alone after forced command performances again and again, trained into instinctive compliance based on years of punishment and pain. She opened her eyes and looked at him, and there was an unusual thoughtfulness in her expression; a certain softness to her mouth and a luminous quality to her eyes rather than their usual dark, snapping energy. 

She didn’t say anything, which was a relief, but she put her hand on his shoulder briefly as she passed. “Let’s go get the kids to bed.”

That was how it all worked in their new, odd family. All of them cracked and twisted in their ways, bits of them darkened or ruined or ripped away by loss and trauma. Yet somehow they all tried to make their adjustments and fit those jagged edges together in a way that wouldn’t cut. He and Johanna put up with the enforced CPC time and the awkwardness of the tight quarters and the showers. Peeta tried his best to become the big brother he’d never been to three siblings, even as he dealt with his own losses. Vick obviously tried to look up to Peeta and forget the shade of the older brothers he’d had, including one who’d been Peeta’s nominal rival for a girl who was now also dead. Posy still was struggling to grasp the loss of a mother and two brothers, so young that she probably barely understood the idea of death and its finality. Lindy was so little, but even she was old enough to ask where her daddy was now and again.

They got through each day carefully. But it was in the pitch darkness after Lights Out that the careful cracks still existing between all of them showed the most. Utterly aware of the heat and presence of Johanna there in the bed so close to him, but both of them still carefully trying to give each other some space, but all too often waking up far closer than when they’d fallen asleep—not yet daring to deliberately touch, though.

Peeta, mere feet away in his own bed, sleeping alone, and he might not have made love with Katniss, but it was no secret they’d shared a bed on the train, and Haymitch had heard some muffled sounds here and there when Peeta must have thought everyone else was sleeping.

Though Peeta wasn’t the only one—he’d heard the higher sound of the sobs from poor Vick, trying so manfully to be so grown up for Posy’s sake. The girls cried too, more openly, younger as they were. There was Posy, all too often crawling in bed with Vick because she obviously felt uncomfortable going to Johanna with Haymitch right there, unable to reconcile it with her memories of going to her mother, sleeping alone all those years, for comfort, cherishing the one familiar, safe thing left in her world and clinging to him with all her might. And little Lindy never slept in her own bed, and she might end up curled up like a little puppy against Peeta, in a heap with Vick and Posy, or wedged safely in between Haymitch and Johanna, with both of them probably grateful for the inadvertent buffer. But she obviously desperately needed someone there to comfort her, and she was so young that it didn’t matter who it was so much as not being alone did.

In the dark he or Johanna could whisper tales to Lindy about a place they didn’t live in, one without the Games or Coriolanus Snow or public executions, a story with brave girls and bold boys, with magic and honor and wonder, a simple, clean world where good would always win. They were well aware of the other ears there listening, all six of them there in that same dark room, connected in their losses and desperately wanting to believe in that world, if only for long enough so they could sleep without waking up screaming. Johanna sang sometimes, lilting songs from Seven that reminded him of quiet streams and the rustle of the wind, tunes that quickly sent Lindy to sleep. Sometimes he gave her the songs of Twelve, its sometimes melancholic, rolling rhythms that still stirred something deep in his blood, and he could sense Vick and Posy’s awareness in the darkness, Seam as Haymitch had been Seam, probably recalling even as he did being raised by a mother alone, one who’d sing those songs sometimes to comfort them.

Day by day they limped on together. That was true for all of them, even Beetee and Wiress, doing their best to look after kids who weren’t a neat, tidy engineering puzzle to solve. Sometimes he looked at all of them and didn’t see the ghosts of the dead and the missing and the families shattered. He’d see Chaff’s wide smile in miniature on Farrow’s face as the solemnity lifted and she laughed at something or the way he looked after Cecelia’s Linsey and Lacey, or the way Trina and Posy played together like long-lost best friends. He’d see the ties between them in the wake of tragedy, new or newly strengthened, frail as spider-silk and yet as strong. Survivors, all of them, victors’ blood or no, and they’d get by.

~~~~~~~~~~

By this point, the chair in Doctor Aurelius’ office was growing unnervingly familiar to Johanna thanks to their twice-weekly sessions. Though it helped that it was one of the few comfortable furnishings she’d encountered here in Thirteen, even if the upholstery was the same drab grey as pretty much everything else.

Apparently the six resident shrinks of District Thirteen got a few small perks like that, probably because she’d come to understand that the majority of the twenty-two thousand people in Thirteen tended to need a psychiatrist at some point in their lives. _Gee, you lock a bunch of people underground without fresh air or sunlight for their entire lives, and control every single aspect of their existence down to the last detail, and eventually they all go a little nuts and need a shrink to cope? This is basically being in prison without committing a damn crime._

Of course, the Phoenix got their senior shrink—her own little perk of being a Very Important Figurehead For The War Effort—and so did her Very Important Advisor And Now Husband Haymitch, and so, by extension, would Very Important Kids Peeta, Vick, Posy, and even Lindy, as she’d seen they were scheduled already for appointments with him.

Sensing the topic at hand today would be the whole marriage-and-kids package deal, she decided to strike first and find out what she wanted to know from him. Leaning her cheek on her fist, elbow propped on the overstuffed arm of the chair, she looked over at Aurelius and quipped, “So is it weird for you now that you’ve got our whole messed-up family in therapy—you ever gonna forget who told you what?”

“No, Johanna, there’s such a thing as patient confidentiality that I respect—so I don’t share what you tell me with Haymitch, if that’s what you’re driving at, and vice versa.” Unruffled as usual, he went on, “Unless, of course, you’d both like one of your weekly sessions to become joint marital counseling?”

“No,” she said too hastily, like jerking away from touching a red-hot stove. Trying quickly to recover and go on the offensive again, she asked, “So how ‘bout what you tell President Coin?” _Can I trust you?_

“I am,” he said carefully, glancing at her over the black enamel rims of his glasses, “of course obliged to report to the president and her staff on matters that are of immediate concern to public safety. Homicidal threats, violent paranoid schizophrenia, and the like.”

It wasn’t exactly an answer. Sighing softly, Aurelius sat back in his chair. Maybe in District Three or the like, he’d have been pleasantly plump in a grandfatherly, inviting sort of a way that would suit his distracted, nonchalant air. He’d spent the first couple of sessions outright napping because she refused to talk, and she’d figured out only later he’d likely done it to get her used to being around him without him pressing her aggressively. But Thirteen made sure he was rail-thin, and as he passed out of middle age into outright old age, his sagging flesh hung all the looser off his bones for having nothing to pad it.

The waiting game began. Surely he’d figured out already that she’d held her tongue for years and years on so many things. She could outwait even his patience. “Johanna,” he pointed out, voice patient as always and pleasantly soft as the well-worn wool of her old winter coat from when he was a child, “do you think this community, close and tight as the living is here, would _work_ if people knew they couldn’t confide safely in their therapist? If they knew their secrets and their fears weren’t safe?”

He had a point there, but she didn’t want to fully concede it, didn’t want to give him the justification for expecting her to simply spill her guts for him. “Most people aren’t of this kind of direct interest to the president,” she shot back.

“You’re correct on that.” He stayed leaning back, casual as ever. “However, I recognize even more so than most of my patients, you—and Haymitch—haven’t got much cause for trust. So if anything, that makes me respect your privacy all the further and not press too far where my help isn’t wanted. And it’s really not in my interest as your doctor to prove your fears right, is it?”

But she’d heard honeyed words before. Even Snow could muster dusty remnants of an old, sweet charm when it suited him, and Haymitch had told her he’d been even better at it twenty years back. She’d walked into that office the day he’d told her she’d become a whore and he’d been every bit as kindly and grandfatherly as Aurelius was right now. “You’ve been around me enough to know I hate all this double-talk, Aurelius. If Coin, or anyone else, demands you tell her exactly what you and I talk about and cites a security concern, what do you tell her?”

“I tell her little things like that your anxiety issues are being successfully addressed—and really, that can’t be hidden from the system given your prescriptions being filled in the infirmary, but beyond that, as little as possible.” He smiled at her. “You don’t think I’ve been asked before about people, or my co-workers who treat others? The leadership always wants more answers than we feel comfortable to provide, and they know we’re essential to the district harmony. So we keep a balance.”

In that moment she glimpsed a mind sharp as a whipsaw beneath the snoozing indolence, and she couldn’t help but be grateful he appeared to be on her side. Still didn’t mean she’d readily give him things without making him work for it a bit, though.

Still, she hesitated, as if pausing in the doorway and not certain whether she could venture out into the world beyond that gateway. He wasn’t a victor, hadn’t endured what she had, and hell, she hadn’t even fully trusted most of the other victors for so long. Trust was a conscious choice yet, not an instinctive offering. But he’d helped her so far, and she couldn’t keep everyone at bay forever. She couldn’t make it alone. “So ask what you want.”

“Do you have anything specific you want to talk about today?”

“Not really. You should be used to that by now.” She couldn’t just sit down and let it all pour out like jamming a spile into a tree. The words wouldn’t flow. There was so much in there still, petty worries to deepest fears, a caustic brew that filled her mind. If he asked, she could answer, but it was beyond her to take the first step.

“Then if you like, now that there’s been some time past the first blush of being newly married and newly a mother, let’s talk about the most recent changes in your life.” He’d spared her for a week now, and she wasn’t sure whether she felt vindicated or glum at having been proved right.

“First blush?” she said dryly. She was terrified and uncomfortable more than she was glowing with contentment. “You make it sound like this is something I _wanted_.”

“Are you unhappy?” he asked gently. “I know it was all very sudden, and perhaps not all by your choice.”

“No, it’s just..,I did what I had to do, I couldn’t leave the kids to…” She shut up, not wanting to say that she’d wanted to keep them out of Thirteen’s system. “It’s just a lot, all right?” she answered him defensively.

“I imagine so. You now have four children all coping with recent trauma, the eldest who currently has special needs, a husband, and your parents recently restored to you as well.” Aurelius sighed, tapped the end of the pencil on his clipboard. “Why don’t we isolate one facet of that today, if you don’t mind? Let’s talk about Haymitch first. Your relationships with your parents and your children are, after all, made easier if your marital partnership’s strong.”

“Fine.”

“Do you find him difficult to live with?”

She had to think about that for a moment, the frustration welling up in her anyway. “It’s not _him_ so much as it’s the situation. We’re stuck in a damn steel box with no privacy, and…”

“And you’ve been used to an entire large house to yourself for years, yes.” His voice was carefully neutral, but she wondered if, born and raised here in Thirteen, he could even imagine houses and windows and all of it. “As has he. So you’d say there are issues with shared space?”

“He’s as nice as he can be about it.” She’d seen that clearly, recognized his careful attempts to give her what space he could, but even he couldn’t offer much. “This place makes it worse. You don’t get to choose anything, and then you have to cope with all that,” she burst out angrily. She couldn’t even have the chance to argue whether she wanted an extra blanket, or the window cracked open, or to go to bed after midnight, or be able to go somewhere for a few hours of privacy. Haymitch, and the kids, being there constantly was one more thing that neatly removed one more large piece of what little autonomy she had. “And there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it, so why are we talking about it?”

“Recognizing the discomfort’s important, and I suggest you two talk about it. If you can express it openly, and find what space you can to give each other, that may help.” He folded his hands over his knee and looked at her directly. “Do you find that the issues of sudden forced intimacy of space, and your past sexual trauma, extend to sexual difficulties between you?”

 _Fuck off_ was her first instinct, followed swiftly by lying about it so that Coin wouldn’t find out that nothing happened in the CPC except talking and napping. But he’d promised she could trust him, and the image of that angry girl with blood-red lipstick and jagged edges shoving some asshole Capitolite up against a bathroom wall simply to feel the hot satisfaction of being in control, burned through her like tracker jacker venom. “I could fuck him,” she said, looking away from him, looking down at her hands and trying to not remember places they’d been and on what people, and how she’d always scrubbed herself raw later once the fierce sense of temporary victory gave way. But she’d told herself over and over that even a momentary sense of vicious triumph was better than being Haymitch and doing her best towards feeling nothing. “I could fuck him, and it would be fine. Maybe it’d even be good. I mean, he’s got the skills.”

She’d said too much, and waited for Aurelius to ask if there was history there, but he didn’t. Maybe he just assumed she could state it as fact given Haymitch’s long years on the circuit. “What do you mean by ‘good’, Johanna? Satisfying in what way?”

“Well, you bet I don’t mean it’ll hurt like hell,” and she was unable to restrain herself from mentally adding, _idiot_ , to the end of that. But that was progress that she kept it silent in her head rather than an acid-laced barb from her tongue. “Yes, I mean it would be ‘physically pleasurable’,” imitating his accent.

“And yet you haven’t slept with him.”

Moment of truth, and she hesitated slightly before admitting, “No. We agreed on that.”

“Agreed?”

“Yes, we talked it over like good little therapy patients.”

“And what did you agree upon?”

She’d backed herself into a corner, and tried to not lash out and get him to back off. “That we wouldn’t have sex until we actually wanted it.”

“And why is that?”

“Oh, because he’s been raped however many hundred times and made to be their obedient little sex toy to the point he’d rather just not feel anything,” and the image of his shame and awkwardness that first time in the CPC rose clear in her mind, admitting that he didn’t know whether he could summon desire at all anymore and how she’d hurt for him to see it, “and most of the people that paid to fuck me wanted me to bleed and cry. See, I didn’t really get to the stage where they wanted _me_ to be the one to humiliate them, hurt them. It’s one thing with a grown woman they’d think they turned all sophisticated, but people don’t really want to be dominated by a seventeen-year-old girl fresh from the rough districts, it’s embarrassing.”

“So you later tried to regain control and a sense of power by turning the tables, and making encounters with any Capitol citizen happen on your terms and then discarding them.”

“Yeah, pretty much.” She shouldn’t be able to feel so deeply relieved to not have to explain it, but it was there anyway, like cool water soothing a burn. The entire country had bought the Capitol celebrity press and thought she was just another dirty slut, but he understood it.

“And with Haymitch?” he prompted her.

“We’ve both fucked on command long enough,” she told him defiantly. “I’m not asking it of him again. I’m not gonna use him to scratch an itch or whatever. Just coming isn’t worth that, even if it’s damn good.”

“So you’re looking for something more meaningful.” She nodded, unable to form words around the tension suddenly in her throat. “You’ve both suffered extreme abuse.” She couldn’t look at him at those words, hating the feeling of being a victim, the memories and the lingering shame of it, but at least he could state it without flinching or awkwardness. “So yes, I would advise that’s actually a very good idea to take sex off the table until you both feel comfortable with the idea of it as something intimate that you want, not something done out of obligation or fear.”

She gave him a slight grunt of acknowledgement there, willing her cheeks to not betray her with the heat of embarrassment. “And then what, genius?”

“If it comes to that point, we can talk more about it. Slow steps. Plans for gradually pushing your boundaries while minimizing the painful reminders.” His smile was slow and a little sad. “You wouldn’t be the first patients I’ve had with a history of sexual trauma by any means. And of course I’ve dealt with the spatial adjustments of recent immigrants newly married besides.”

Weirdly enough, that was a relief. He couldn’t have dealt with people who’d been through the Games and the like, and he probably hadn’t dealt with people pimped out as badly as they’d been, but at least it was somewhat familiar territory for him.

It was also a relief to hear she wasn’t alone in that, not some kind of freak or aberration. Others had dealt with this crap before. No judgment, no blame, that she wasn’t like Finnick who’d still managed to go on and find someone to sleep with and love like a normal human being, Finnick who still liked to think the best of people. Finnick who, she could admit quietly to herself, had become that hopeless yardstick by which she measured herself and always fell short, though at least the other end of that measure made her feel a bit better about herself, because she hadn’t yet fallen so far as to mimic Haymitch’s cautionary tale.

But from Aurelius, that very normalcy helped cut it down to something that might somehow become manageable over time, rather than the insurmountable wall of “Johanna is irreparably fucked up” that it had seemed. “Tabling that, if I might ask something more important?” She gestured for him to go on, an extravagantly sarcastic wave complete with raised eyebrows. “It sounds like you two are communicating well enough, and my impression is that there’s a clear bond between you. But this is a question we’ll revisit in the future. As of today, do you feel you can trust Haymitch, that he’s with you as a partner? I don’t mean only fighting by your side in war situations either, Johanna. Do you feel you can trust him emotionally, trust him physically, to care about your well-being? “

There were moments she woke in the night or when she turned to him for something, aware of him there, taller and bigger, the strength of that larger, masculine frame. Maybe it was the awareness of the arena, or from being made into a Capitol whore, or both, but part of her couldn’t help but assess him as a threat regardless. He was stronger than her, and he’d fought and killed in his life. He could hurt her badly if he chose. 

But he hadn’t. Even in fury, which she hadn’t seen until recently, he hadn’t lashed out physically. He’d stung her emotionally, but it hadn’t been low blows. Instead, her mind filled with him, steady and sure and stubborn, encouraging her, discussing things, sometimes bickering, but never coddling or attacking. 

She’d seen him with the kids too, and beneath gingerness and the fear, she could see the ferocity of how deeply he cared about them already. The small kindnesses, the way he’d fight for her, all while expecting or asking nothing in return, in a way that strangely made her want to fiercely jump to his defense in return, to make sure that he too had every good thing he’d been denied, the goodness that he deserved. When had it shifted anyway, and she saw him as more than the whiskey-soaked fellow sufferer who was the only one who wouldn’t judge or reject her? When the hell had that kind of tender sentiment sneaked in? 

They’d go to Nine next week, and the enormity of that task was frightening. Bad enough to have to leave the kids and worry that they’d lose what little security they had if she or Haymitch didn’t come back, and worry what would happen to them while they were away. But she couldn’t think about that too much now. The fight ahead was enough to worry about. She’d seen the trepidation in him, and in talking to Clover, she’d gotten the sense of how hard a fight they had ahead. But he’d be with her for it, not just guarding her back, but helping her through whatever they’d expect from her as the Phoenix, ready to defend her but willing to let her fight for herself too. Somehow, it made the prospect of the unknown ahead in Milltown far less daunting to know he’d be there with her for it. Something less than a lover, something more than a friend, but if there was any person she could choose to stand by her side throughout all this, she could say without hesitation it would be him. The enormity of finding herself that tied to him—to anyone—was both a comfort and a terror, and she wasn’t sure which one would win out in the end.

She met Aurelius’ eyes squarely, willing him to believe this, if nothing else. “I trust him. He’s earned it.”


	30. Chapter 30

Clover had grown up in the middle of Nine, on Collective XII, though they’d called it “Pioneertown”. It was smack in the center of the country, and she imagined there must have been farmers there before in the days of old North America, even as the fields apparently were overgrown with prairie grass, because the board-flat land stretching to the far horizons with rich blackland dirt overturned by the tillers and plows, grew grain like nobody’s business. That was why it was one of the first farms established in Panem, in the wake of the nuclear strikes and the famine and war that had led to people abandoning their homes and their farms, collecting in the safe zones around the country that eventually became the nuclei of the district populations. That was why it had gotten its name. They’d been the hope of the country for bread.

She’d never been to Milltown before, home of some of the poorest in Nine, stuffed away in the mills from dawn until dusk, heaving flour bags and the like. The Capitol wouldn’t make its victors live there, that was for damn sure. It was in the far north district, and as howling cold as winter could be out on the plains where she’d been born and raised, it was that much worse this further north as November came on. There was already a few inches of snow down on the ground that made her grateful for warm wool socks and scarves and the insulated leather shooting gloves on her hands. She’d had a ragged coat and leaky boots as a kid.

Of course, as a kid she wouldn’t have been here ready to go on the attack. Staring at the sight of Milltown, it was almost hard to believe this belonged in the same district as the farms she knew and loved. True, any farmer had a fair share of mechanization, and the inevitable screams of frustration as any complicated repair meant sending to Six for parts and to Three for an agricultural tech skilled with tractors and combines and the like, as the Capitol refused to let Nine become self-sufficient.

Milltown seemed like nothing Nine, machinery on a nightmare level, all harsh angles and cinderblock and steel and belching smoke, a dark, sooty, close-built and overcrowded warren of a place. The Capitol too had obviously taken time to prepare for the inevitable assault, probably well assured the rebels couldn’t afford to just bomb the hell out of it and destroy it—so instead, now it bristled with a twenty foot cinderblock wall, topped with coils of razor wire, the tenements and mill chimneys and silos rising above the grim grey bastion. It made her claustrophobic just to look at it: a slum, to use the Eight term. And it really was like the thankfully brief stays she’d had in District Eight on her tour and Rye’s and Amaranth’s—and the memory of those two still hurt like a bruise pressed with a fingertip, because they’d been younger than her, should have outlived her for sure, and how was she Nine’s only living victor now? 

Nine’s victors seemed ill-fated: four women, one man. Winnow was the victor of the 7th, contemporary with Mags and Woof, had been the only living Nine victor for Clover’s Games, and she’d died of pneumonia scarce two years later because she’d gone out in the winter night to try to care for her granddaughter Maizey. Harvest won the first Quell, the 25th, and promptly went and “accidentally” drowned, unable to take the fact that her district had voted her as worthy of death. Rye in the 59th and Amaranth in the 71st had survived almost by sheer luck, and she could admit quietly to herself that most other years, they wouldn’t have made it through, and their quick deaths in the Quell seemed only to prove it. The Capitol must have seen it, because the lack of a decisive and flashy victory meant at least they were spared years being sold on the circuit. Single-summer flashes in the pan, both of them, quietly given to buyers a handful of times and then released. How she’d miss them, though, Rye’s shy good humor and Amaranth’s teasing jokes. 

Only Winnow had made it to the cusp of old age, but none of Nine’s victors had died peacefully in bed. Looking at the fortified hive of Milltown, mentally crunching the numbers of the sheer number of people there—eight thousand or more—she couldn’t help but wonder if this would be where she met her end, and finally met the fate that she’d escaped by not being reaped for the Quell. Why should she be any different from her tragic brothers and sisters in Victors’ Field and expect that she, of all of them, deserved a happy ending?

Johanna and Blight, the short and round woman and the tall and stocky man, physical mismatches, were matches in their expression. They looked equally grim and off-balance, probably as unsettled by the grimy urban environment as she was—they might be children of the forest rather than the farms, but they were used to fresh air and even the steel corridors of Thirteen couldn’t change that. Only Haymitch looked unperturbed, but that was Haymitch anyway. He’d always striven for that nonchalant and even glib expression, even as a kid. But then, he’d grown up in a mining town—tight quarters with everyone crowded into one small town, and the sooty coal dust all over everything, as she remembered. How depressing it must be that this probably felt a bit like home for him.

“Well,” Johanna said finally, tone dry as a bin full of flour, “this is gonna be fun, so nobody try to get killed, huh?” With the thought of Ami, and Alfie and Barl, back in Thirteen and in the care of Chantilly and Chaff and Wiress and Beetee, she almost snapped at Johanna that some of them there didn’t take it as a game, because they had something to lose.

It was an old instinct, impatience with Seven’s female victor and her angry dramatics. It took Clover a dizzying moment to place things properly and remember that Johanna too had people to lose now, and that the tightly controlled expression on her face and the fierce intensity of her eyes was probably trying to keep fear at bay, not mocking the rest of them.

She pulled herself back from that, and the thoughts about Pioneertown and all the rest of it, a ready refuge from the reality right in front of her. Maybe she wasn’t as openly off-kilter about it as Annie, but she could admit, quietly, that it wasn’t only Blight in their marriage who’d had a bad habit of not facing things. But she didn’t have that option now. She couldn’t run or hide from what was going on here, and couldn’t turn away from the daughter she’d been able to reclaim, and the nephews that she’d now taken in as her own.

It had been so damn hard to say goodbye to them, and the memory of Ami clinging to her brought back to mind the way she’d wanted to clutch that blanket-wrapped bundle to her, still exhausted and twinging with pain, but handing over her child to her sister, safety and anonymity the best possible love she could give. It hadn’t saved Ami from the Capitol’s clutches in the end, but she suspected had Snow been aware of the lies she and Blight had told, it might have gone far worse.

She tried to jolt herself out of that again, but she couldn’t forget Ami’s hug, Alfie and Barl’s anxious but hopeful expressions. No, this wasn’t hiding, was it? This warmth, even mingled with the fear and anxiety, couldn’t be merely ducking the reality of the coming battle. This was her taking strength from the family she would fight to preserve.

Without even needing to think about it, she reached over and slipped her hand into Blight’s. It still caught her off-guard that she could have him so openly, every day, but the pressure of his fingers in hers, his huge hand engulfing hers, felt reassuring in so many ways. This time too it was more than the memory of it to carry with her back to Nine for long months alone. He was here with her, and they had Ami, and they’d be a family, finally. “We’ll go on back to ‘em,” he said in a gruff murmur, his mind obviously in accord with hers.

Like the arena, the moments leading up to the inevitable seemed like the worst part. So she was gratified that when Johanna stepped in front of their gathered crowd to speak, it seemed she wasn’t too inclined to make it dramatic or lengthy.

Johanna folded her arms across her ample chest, and her dark eyes scanned the people. Clover’s eyes went to those around here as well: an even mix. The tall, fair-haired, fair-skinned folk throughout most of Nine were here, and some of Ten’s people too, even southerners from the cattle ranches with warm, dusty-brown skin, and here and there were some from Eleven, in every shade of the earth from the lightest ochre to a deep, lustrous near-black. The district people were all dressed in their battered work clothes, jeans and shirts and the like faded and worn soft by washings and wear and sun, but they stood with rifles easily in hand now, casual posture except for the nervous glances of some towards the bastion of Milltown right across the creek. These were the experienced fighters they’d all sent to help with this task. There were Thirteen soldiers too, a motley mix of hair and skin colors and heights, but all so very stiff in their uniforms, standing at a barely relaxed attentive rest looking towards their unit commanders, pale from lack of sunlight to the point where the fairest among them were actually burning from the late autumn sun overhead reflecting back off the snow.

“I’m not much one for speeches,” Johanna told them. “And no, they’re not recording this one. I told them to forget it.” A ripple of laughter, probably at Plutarch Heavensbee’s expense, greeted that, and Clover had the notion that Johanna had won a few more points with that act. “I won’t lie and say this will be easy. The wall is crawling with Peacekeepers,” she nodded towards the white-clad soldiers patrolling the walls, “and that’s even before we get through into the town. You might well not come back from this fight. But here you are anyway. And blunt truth is that we need to take Milltown. We need the food to get us through the winter, all of us from every district, so we don’t starve. But this is more than that. You’re not here only for the flour supply—even though you and yours back home definitely want a full stomach. This isn’t your town, and for a lot of you, not even your district. This isn’t home. But you’re here because your homes are free, because you’ve fought and made yourselves free, and now you’re willing to risk your lives to see others become free. No districts, no Games bullshit rivalries, no Capitol boundaries keeping us divided—the war called for those who were willing, and you came, to fight together. So whatever you do today, be sure the world will see what a free woman or man can do, fighting for the world they want, for the people they love.”

With that, she looked them over again, eyes sweeping across the assembled troops with that hawklike gaze of hers. Then she hopped off the rock, landing lightly on her booted toes, and headed over to grab her rifle. “Speech over, now let’s hurry up and wait until dark,” she deadpanned. They’d assault the wall after dark—which in the shortening days of late October, this far north with the frost-crisp ground underfoot, wouldn’t be too long.

So that meant going back to the small fires they’d built, huddled around them in the steadily deepening twilight, trying to keep fingers and toes warm, here and there the murmur of voices as various groups and squads tried to while away the time without giving up the edge of readiness.

The Inkermann twins, Thirteen to the core, busied themselves polishing their firearms yet again. Gentian Deerfield pulled out a well-thumbed book, sitting cross-legged and casually reading. As for her, she sat down next to Blight, sitting on her haunches for a while to stay off the cold ground, and then giving it up as bad job as her forty-plus knees protested the motion in the cold after a few minutes. Sighing, she swept her long grey overcoat underneath her and sat down on it, grateful for the insulation of the thick fabric. Blight did the same, leaning in close. “The lumber mills and paper mills back in Seven like this?” she asked him, nodding towards Milltown, embarrassed now to realize how little they’d talked about Seven and Nine and the little things of everyday life through all the years, because it was such a painful reminder that they spent far more time apart than together.

“Stinks like hell when the paper mill are running,” Blight answered, “but it’s about ten miles up the lakeshore from the town—there’s a railway to bring the workers there—so it’s not like it’s squatting right there. The lumber mills, they don’t stink.” He smiled. “Nothing like the smell of fresh-cut wood, and it’s all the sharper when it’s cold and they’re doing most of the saw-down of the logs—the wood’s dried down a bit from summer, less sap-sticky and no smell of the needles or the leaves, and something about winter air does that anyway, you know? It’s like the air carries the scent better.”

She tried to imagine it, hearing the wistfulness in his voice, but the only wood she’d really grown up with was the stacks of boards for houses and barns, and the rails for fencing. Not a tree to be seen on most Nine farms. The patch of forest had frightened her a bit in her arena, to be honest, dark and closed-in and brooding as the trees seemed to make things. Even now, walking on the surface in Thirteen, she had to try to see things his way while watching how alive and at home he seemed up in the woods, but it was like learning an entirely new language, late in life and struggling.

Ami wouldn’t be like that now. Hopefully she’d get her father’s Seven ways and the best of Nine that Clover could give her too, and Alfie and Barl could have that choice as well. “You said something about a holiday tree once?” she prompted him.

“I doubt they’ll let us cut one down and bring it into our compartment in Thirteen,” he said with a chuckle, leaning in and brushing a soft kiss across her lips. “And I don’t have my family’s ornaments either. Next year.”

“Next year,” she echoed, willing with all her might that there would be a next year.

“So what did you folks do in Nine for New Year’s?”

“Given we were usually buried under a few feet of snow and had to dig paths between houses, not much,” she said with a bleak humor. “We baked, mostly—bread with some spices and dried fruits. Made cookies and the like. You’d save for some butter and eggs and good white flour for that. We won’t get to do that in Thirteen either. Then we pretty much knitted all winter once harvest was shipped north to Milltown.” Winter was the time of year when they usually ended up employed in whatever bullshit menial tasks the Capitol decided to give them, quotas for knitting sweaters and socks and baby blankets because, presumably, the people in Eight were too busy in the factories actually producing the yarn. 

“Well, bet you’ll have plenty of knitting time if you want this winter, though can’t say as I’d blame you if you never want to see another pair of needles again,” Haymitch said dryly, crouching down beside her and Blight. “Sorry to interrupt, but got something that our happy little squad needs to look at here.”

Getting to her feet, she was almost grateful to him for the distraction. Too many memories, a few bright but many painful, and worries about the kids and what would happen now. She wondered if she’d even be permitted to give them anything for New Year’s, or if Thirteen would prohibit that as well. So this was the shape of freedom.

The two of them followed Haymitch to a small dip in the prairie where Xan Inkermann crouched, long rifle assembled, and Ran at her side. Johanna stood there too, hands stuffed in her pockets, and Gentian regarded the whole scene with some interest. “So what’s this about?” Blight asked Haymitch.

“Xan?” Haymitch replied with a snarky over-the-top cheer, “want to do the honors?”

“What’s my target?” the Thirteen woman asked, rolling up to her knees and bracing the rifle against her shoulder. “One of the guards?”

“Oh, no. Just aim midway between two guard stations and give ‘em a shot. Thing’s quiet enough they won’t hear?”

Xandra grunted in amusement, and Ranald said dryly, “You’d hear more noise from a slamming door, Abernathy. Why are you wanting her to waste a shot? Better ways of range-finding for that, and we don’t want the guards alerted already.”

“Humor me.” A thread of exasperation crept into Haymitch’s voice. “Hit the dirt, everyone, just in case they’re looking.”

“Is this based on orders?” Xandra asked, shaking her head. “I thought the assault wasn’t going to begin for a few hours yet.”

“Consider it an order if you want,” Johanna replied. “I’ll take the heat for it if need be.”

“Your funeral, Phoenix, but all right,” Xandra said with a shrug, sighting the rifle. “Aiming between the second and third guard posts here on the east face.”

“Visual lock on target,” Ran answered. “Not gonna use the binocs—nothing for you to hit except thin air. But so close you can’t miss.” Given it was that distant, Clover couldn’t help some skepticism on that score.

A slight _pop_ like a cork sprung from a champagne bottle, and then suddenly, the air right where they all looked between the second and third guard posts burst into a bright flash of neon-blue light in a grid form that quickly faded. “Yep, they’ve got a forcefield up,” Haymitch said calmly. “Thought I saw it earlier today too for a moment—maybe a bird hit it?”

“That happened sometimes out in the woods,” Johanna answered. “Anything bumped the forcefield at night, you’d see it flare like that.”

“Those forcefields of yours in Seven—one way?” Haymitch asked, rolling over and pushing up to his elbows. “You could get out, but nothing could get in?” 

“Yeah,” Blight acknowledged. “There’s gotta be several types, you know? There’s the ones we used in Seven. Then the arena ones—those must have been special.” Haymitch let out a bark of sarcastic laughter at that. Given both Clover and Blight had watched his Games live from Mentor Central, they certainly got the joke, and for just a moment, she had the memory of a Twelve boy laughing as a rock flew back to his hand. “Parachute and body retrieval craft could get in and out, without dropping the containment.”

“I imagine they had programming to open part of the dome while keeping the walls intact,” Clover pointed out.

“Don’t go all Three on me, dear,” Blight said with a grin.

“If I was going Three on you I’d be using much bigger words,” she said, unable to help a smile in reply.

“There’s another kind,” Johanna said almost solemnly, with what Clover would have called an apologetic glance towards Blight. “The kind nothing gets in or out. They used that with the jabberjays.” 

She could feel Blight tense next to her, still as stone, and it was too easy to recall the image of him on screen wide-eyed and horrified, his screaming her name over the headphones in terror, beating on the unbreakable, translucent walls of the forcefield holding him there. She reached over and took his hand, squeezed it tightly in hers. _I’m here._

For a moment everything seemed terribly still, and then Johanna spoke up again. “I imagine it’s the first type here—they can get out, but we can’t get it.”

“Would make sense,” Ran answered, large, paw-like hands resting on his knees now. “For them to not be able to fire a bullet out is missing a big opportunity to take potshots at attackers while they’re stuck trying to deal with the forcefield, let alone blasting out the wall.”

“Well, we’re fucked,” Gentian said gloomily, spine sagging into a dejected curve as she sighed.

“Unless we happen to get a lightning storm and someone can creep in close enough to stab it with a trident,” Blight said with that thinly veiled Seven sarcasm.

“Or maybe our busy Three worker bees have anticipated this problem after the arena,” Haymitch said, his cheerful sarcasm not even remotely hidden. “Maybe we’ve now got ourselves what amounts to a lightning strike in a box—they called it some kind of EMG cannon, EMP, whatever letters? Long technical explanation, of course. I lost ‘em after about ten seconds.”

“That long?” Blight deadpanned, and Haymitch laughed at that, teeth flashing bright in the deepening night.

Johanna turned to her husband and said, utterly serious, “Oh for cryin’ in the woods—c’mon, Haymitch. You’ve really got to stop doing this shit where you’ve been going behind our backs for weeks and just drop this whole _plan_ on us suddenly as a surprise. It’s not the Games. We’re not at crossed interests now. You’re not stuck working alone try to save tributes anymore, you know? We’re in this together, dammit. Or we’re supposed to be.”

Clover heard Haymitch take in a quick breath, obviously ready to hurry back with a defensive reply, but the silence remained, none of them willing to break it. Finally, he gave a slight nod towards Johanna. “Fair point. Old habits die hard.” True enough. It hadn’t been easy for her to get used to Rye being there and not going it alone, and she didn’t have a quarter century of it to deal with as Haymitch did, in Mentor Central and back at home.

“Not saying I’m not glad our favorite Three nerds made that EKT, or whatever the fuck it is, mind,” Johanna answered him, tone mild now as a spring day, obviously teasing. 

“You figured it would be there?” Xan asked Haymitch, already done reloading her rifle with automatic, practiced motions, not even needing to look.

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Haymitch said dryly. “Figured they’d start to slap forcefields around _some_ important points, anyway, and the fact they built a wall just made it more likely, right?”

“You and forcefields,” Blight muttered, shaking his head, shoulders shaking with laughter.

“Yeah, sorry, I can’t win this one by bouncing things off it,” Haymitch answered him with a low chuckle.

“So what’s the super-secret plan?” she asked him.

“We’re gonna need a squad to go fire the—“

“Just call it the ‘lightning box’ or something,” Ran cut in. “I’m getting a headache from all these letters.”

“The lightning box, fine—they’re gonna need to creep in close enough to contact the forcefield. I imagine we’ll have to send in the explosives team too to plant the charges on the wall—Gen,” Haymitch nodded towards the lanky, rye-dark One woman, “reckon you’ll be on that.”

“There’s a Twelve woman here too who said she was some kind of ‘blast boss’ down the coal mines,” Gentian replied, folding her arms over her chest and looking back over her shoulder towards the wall.

“Blast captain?” Haymitch’s tone sounded surprised. “Well, ain’t that a piece of luck on our side. How the hell did someone from Twelve get out—no, never mind it, time for all that later. I’ll get Boggs to send her along with you, Gen.”

“You said this lightning box thing knocks out all electronics in the area?”

“Yeah, that’s about the shape of it.”

“So it’s back to old-school wired detonators, nothing remote, and we hope they don’t catch on and shoot out the wires, or the team, and the moment that forcefield goes down they’ll be looking to shoot anything that moves. So it means if you want it done right and for sure, someone probably stays behind at the wall and manually deploys the charges the moment the rest are clear.” Nonchalant as she was about it, Clover would have thought Gentian was talking about anything except a deliberate choice of death.

Nobody said much of anything for a few seconds. Being four survivors of the arena, and being from districts where tributes were almost guaranteed early deaths, they could identify what amounted to a suicide mission either way.

Johanna breathed out in a slow sigh, sitting down heavily on the ground. “I’m not from Two, Gen. I won’t give anyone some crap speech about honorable sacrifice, ‘specially when they won’t let me volunteer for the job myself.”

“They won’t,” Haymitch said grimly. He then added, so softly that Clover almost missed it, “And _I_ won’t.”

“No, they won’t let any of you four victors into that,” Xan replied, voice neutral enough that it was hard to tell if there was judgment behind the words or not. 

The tension grew, and grew, and the divide between victors and the others seemed unbearable. Finally, it got to be too much, and Clover spoke up. “It’s Gen’s team and we won’t be allowed on it. So best for us to just shut up about it and let her do her job and assemble her squad.” Bad enough for it to become a situation where some lives were deemed too important for a suicide mission—and she was under no illusions that they wouldn’t be held back from the breach in the wall until others had endured the first and heaviest casualties as well. It would be worse if they kept meddling in it and acting like it was their call to make, from lofty safety. True, they’d had to do that for years and years from Mentor Central, unable to do more than plan and strategize and advise and just talk and talk and talk, but old habits died hard, like Haymitch said. Whether someone on the bomb squad volunteered to stay back or they drew short straws or whatever, the best dignity the victors could give that courage was to step back and admit they had no right to guide their mission.

Gentian nodded at that, a still, calm figure against the backdrop of the night. Clover couldn’t see her face, but she had the sense it would have been utterly composed as well. “Give me half an hour. I’ve got a team in mind.” She took a few steps towards the campfires then turned back. “Whichever of us it is, Mas—Abernathy— _Phoenix_ —you give them their dignity, hear? You make sure people don’t forget, but I don’t want that camera team turning them into some melodramatic television martyr.”

“I won’t,” Johanna promised, and there was a grim, steely note in her voice that obviously told Gentian she meant it.

The six of them felt like a small island among several thousand troops, one campfire sitting there in silence. At many of the others, she could hear stories and laughter and song, the aggravating rattle of dice in a tin cup—people doing what they could to forget their fear. If there had been any kind of shelter for miles, she didn’t doubt some folks might have sneaked off and coupled up. Whatever took the edge off, whatever made it all bearable—that was how she and Blight had started, so long ago. They’d both slept with other victors too, granted, and it had taken the better part of ten years for them to admit it was something that mattered, because that meant it was something they could lose—after Haymitch’s example that became an even more fearful notion—and something they could have only in broken fragments anyway.

She had him now, and the best of him too as he fought to overcome his problems and become a better man. She had the daughter she’d had to hand over minutes after her birth, the little girl she’d cried for nights after that, breasts aching, heart aching, but sure that she’d done the only thing that could keep Ami safe. Sacrifices made—choosing to have a child as a small the piece of the husband she couldn’t have, giving that child to her sister to help keep her alive and safe the way Ami couldn’t be as the daughter of Clover and Blight. 

She’d accepted all of it as necessary, and now it had come back to her. A wife and a mother, and the enormity of those roles scared the hell out of her in some ways. She’d lived with only pieces of it for so long. But she’d lied and kept secrets even for those. For what she had now, for the man at her side, for the kids waiting for her back in Thirteen? They might not let her blow up that bomb, but she’d fight for them, die for them if need be. That was the root of things. That was what Katniss Everdeen had tried to do, willing to die to save someone she loved and knowing the odds were bad, an act that became more than just another grim, Capitol-mandated blood price, a genuine sacrifice against impossible odds rather than the mockery of the word thanks to the heavily stacked odds for the Careers. Katniss had made volunteering meaningful last year, and even her death couldn’t take that away from her. 

Staring into the flickering flames, dying down now to embers, she wondered if Gentian or whoever would stay behind could say they were doing it for someone back home. Maybe for them it wasn’t a grim necessity, but an act that they could hope meant their husband or wife or daughter or son wouldn’t go hungry this winter, and that their family might not have to fear starvation and the Games anymore. People had killed in the arena for less than that, hadn’t they? She glanced around at her fellow victors, seeing the brooding expressions on their faces. 

Haymitch most of all seemed lost in another world, perhaps thinking of a life so deliberately laid down tonight and thinking too of the girl he’d tried to save once again this year. _Peeta survived,_ she thought. _I think Katniss would have counted that worthwhile._ But she’d been friends with Haymitch all these years, and so knew far better than to prod at the wound of another dead tribute.

The dark descended in a rush, like a downpour of blackness, as all the lights suddenly went out in Milltown, and she could hear cries of alarm and yelled orders as the forcefield now wasn’t there to hold back the sounds of the Peacekeepers. The crack of rifle fire as the watchers on the walls began shooting, and then suddenly the night erupted into flame right between two of the watch post, making her close her eyes. She told herself it was because the light hurt her dark-adjusted eyes, and that was true, but she also closed them in a momentary thought of whoever had just coolly chosen to cut their life short so that others might live. The rumbling roar of it filled her ears, and it gave way to the cheers of their assembled troops, recognizing the way to Milltown was now open, probably not aware of exactly what had happened at the wall. 

“Keep the light sticks for when you’re inside the breach and then toss ‘em somewhere to light up the battlefield,” she heard an authoritative shout that sounded like Boggs. “If you snap ‘em now during the approach, you just make yourself a target!” Now she remembered the chemical light stick tucked in her backpack, cheaper and less fragile than a flashlight or lantern. They’d need that illumination, or else it would be a fight in total darkness, far too easy to kill ally and foe alike. She’d seen that all too well in several arenas over the years. She heard Haymitch’s breathing quicken—his arena had been one with blackout horrors in the night—and then the low murmur of Johanna’s voice as she said something to him.

“It’s war,” Ran said quietly as she opened her eyes, looking right at her as he shouldered his rifle. “People were—are—going to die. We knew that. One person’s life doesn’t matter against the greater good.” But he sounded uncertain, as if parroting something that no longer entirely made sense to him.

The pointed silence from the four victors felt almost like its own presence. District Thirteen at work—no wonder none of them could settle in there and belong. They’d all been in a place where their lives would have been marked as worth nothing but a few moments of entertainment value in their ending. The stark greater good might not be the sybaritic decadence of the Games, but did any one life have value in Thirteen either? That one life mattered like hell to those left scarred by its absence. She’d already lost Rye and Amaranth in the Quell, and Lispadza and Timothy executed, and the places where they should have been still ached like a missing limb. If Blight died tonight in this attack, or even Johanna or Haymitch, a part of her would never be the same. 

Blight’s right index finger was up as he jabbed it at Ran, as if ready to say something heated, but then he shook his head and let the hand drop. Johanna gave off an irritated grunt and turned to sharpen her hatchets again with aggressive motions. Bawled orders in the night sent the first wave of soldiers flooding at a quick jog across the plain toward the still-smoking narrow gap in the wall, strewn with a field of rubble. The crack of rifle fire and the singing whine of the bullets filled the air with a continuous hum, and even as she watched, she could see figures start to stagger and fall in the moonlight. Blood shed already, and it was far from over. 

Ami—she was doing this for Ami, as hard as it was. That was what being a mother was like, wasn’t it? She’d fight for her daughter, and for her sons too, because Alfie and Barl were hers now, just the same as if she’d given birth to them as well. 

“The day any of us stop giving a shit about people dying,” Haymitch replied softly, adjusting the knives hanging at his belt, “is the day we’re no better than them.” 

Whether _them_ was the Capitol, Thirteen, or both, Clover couldn’t say for sure. Either way, she agreed.

~~~~~~~~~~

The words rang clear through the chilly morning, easily heard even a ways down the muddy, winding path up the mountain. “Five minutes down, and then we form up again!”

Another break on the march, and Cashmere perched on the flat-sheared face of a broken boulder beside the path. The Thirteen soldiers in their little army didn’t look out over the vista there, plunging abruptly to the valley far below, but she couldn’t look away at the wide open space of it all, the glint of morning sunlight now touching the hollows that had hidden in the shadows of night until now. She breathed in the almost painfully crisp air, feeling contentedly at home, despite this being Two rather than One. She’d missed the high mountains, stuck belowground in District Thirteen as they’d been, had no idea how the ore miners back home in One, or Twelve’s coal miners, managed it, and though she’d be loath to admit it out loud, it gave her some sympathy for their people, living so much of their lives without fresh air or daylight.

She’d lived most of her life in high fashion, a perfect porcelain doll never seen dressed carelessly, let alone sloppily. Even her “casual” clothing was elegantly timeless fashion, sweaters and blouses and trousers and skirts all tailored to fit, made of luxurious materials and carefully chosen hues. Like every other female cadet, she’d spent weeks learning the perfect makeup for her complexion and coloring and features when she was twelve years old and stuffing cloth down her bra in hopes to make the Academy instructors notice her more. She probably could have turned out perfect winged eyeliner in the arena with no mirror, had it been required, and had her preps not temporarily tattooed her makeup on her and dyed her lashes so that no matter how rough the situation got, her face would still be perfect for up to a month of the Games—assuming she took no injuries to the face, anyway. District One’s tributes, and later its victors, had a reputation to maintain. 

She slept on hard ground now, on a tarp beneath a tent, dressed in drab grey with her hair in a ponytail—she’d refused Thirteen’s rules about military haircuts and that twit Plutarch had thankfully argued that it was better for the cameras—and she hadn’t seen a hint of eyepaint or lip rouge in weeks. And it was glorious, because she had a rifle and her butterfly swords, and she could fight now, for anger and for freedom and for the hope of getting Gloss back alive, fight on her own terms without bullshit expectations of making violence into graceful poetry, glamorous savagery without a hair out of place. 

It felt satisfyingly honest to use those skills to a purpose, and to not pretend it was anything beautiful. She fought and killed because it was necessary, and one thing she’d say for District Thirteen, they were direct and quick about that, as with everything else. 

Annie sat down beside her, rubbing the back of her knees, carefully massaging out the calf strain. But at least compared to when they’d begun the fight, the Four victor no longer huffed and wheezed and strained with the rugged terrain and thin mountain air. And for anyone who’d thought Annelle Cresta was a crazy weakling given her less than impressive showing—for a Career, anyway—in the arena, she’d quickly put paid to that idea with a well-cast spear during their first battle for the village of Burnt Tree. Maybe the woman could have survived the Quell. Certainly she’d have had more chance than old Mags. “So what’s the word?” she asked Cashmere, green eyes steady as she glanced over the plunge without fear or trepidation.

Cashmere, and everyone else from One and Two, had definitely lost some respect for Annie with that move, even before her dear little Finnick fucked them all over to boot. Careers were volunteers, leaders, fighters. They sent the strongest and best to protect those less able from dying in the arena. They didn’t, in the physical peak of life, sob on stage and willingly cower behind an old woman who’d deserved much better than to die like that. Dark horse districts were one thing, but Careers should do better. 

Whether Annie had chosen to fight now from being consciously aware that she had dug herself into a hole or not, she’d paid her dues so far as Cashmere was concerned. She’d fought, and never complained, and tried to deal with her little blips out of reality as best she could, struggling back to reality. If sometimes she looked tired and strained and took a walk alone in the evening, it was understandable. Her boyfriend was in the Capitol, if he was still alive at all.

And none of them had been at their best in the Capitol’s grasp, had they? If Cashmere could find it in her to give Johanna Mason and her oblivious bitchiness a second chance, she had to give Annie the same. At least Annie had only been weak, not hurtful. Not to mention Cashmere herself hadn’t exactly been sweetness and light. It was odd, trying to shake perceptions of people developed over years of knowing them. It wasn’t quite as fake as gilded veneer, but apparently for more than a few of them there had been something beneath that surface-self, waiting only for a chance to come forward under this kind of mingled freedom and pressure. Well, it took immense pressure to make diamonds, didn’t it? 

“Two days’ march to Icewind Peak, Lyme told us,” she replied, pulling a handful of dried cranberries from her pack. Trail rations, for quick energy. She held her palm out to Annie and let the other woman pluck a few with her fingertips, acknowledging Annie’s quiet thanks with a nod of her own. 

“She said we’ve got only a few weeks more here before we have to pull out for winter,” Annie said, popping the cranberries in her mouth.

Cashmere laughed. “Lucky for you, little thin-blooded southerner.” But she didn’t say it with the honest scorn she would have given any insult only months ago, lacing it with sharp edges and poison to the bet of her ability. “Winter in the mountains is brutal,” she acknowledged, chewing on a few more of the cranberries and washing them down with a swig of metal-tasting water from her canteen. “We’d be as likely to freeze to death as anything trying to slog through the mountains towards other villages, and I imagine they’ll garrison the villages we’ve taken with Thirteen soldiers and the Two rebels.”

“Yeah, no point abandoning them and handing them right back over to the Capitol,” Annie agreed. Cashmere smiled, seeing the strategic mind of a Career at work there. “Capitol’s not going to like having us sitting right here on their back porch, as it were.”

“They’ll like it even less that some of Two is rebelling.” Not to the point of liberating any of the Peacekeeper villages, really, by the time they got there, but at both of the two villages they’d been to so far, and a granite quarry, they hadn’t lacked for allies to suddenly join them. Some even had come on the march as well. Even some of the supposedly fanatically loyal Twos were fed up with how the Capitol had broken the pact of the Games. _Scratch a Two and they bleed honor._ No surer way to piss them off than to lie, cheat, or break a deal. Katniss Everdeen and her obvious hatred for Careers could never had reached Two, but how Snow had bent over backwards to kill her, risking everything by throwing all those other victors under the wheels of the train as well, had massively backfired on him. Cashmere still wasn’t going to give credit on that to Katniss. She wasn’t glad the girl was dead, but she had no tears or grief to waste on one oblivious self-centered Twelve brat, no matter how she’d lucked into starting something. Far too many dead already to pretend that one girl meant something far more than all the others. Snow had made that mistake and it had cost him.

Sitting there resting her aching feet, feeling where a fold of her slightly oversized wool socks had rubbed against her toes and started to form a blister, she realized that she would miss this, locked up for the winter in Thirteen. The freedom, the sense of purpose, the beauty of sunlight on snow-capped mountains—her world would be dull and grey again. But someday she’d be out of that Thirteen bunker for good, and she wouldn’t let anyone, Capitol or Thirteen or even One, tell her how she ought to live and dress and eat and act. “I think we’re all looking forward to not being good little puppets,” she said, and Annie’s wry grin of acknowledgment told her plenty there.

“You should come see Four, when it’s all over,” Annie answered. “The real Four, not the Victory Tour.”

Caught aback by the casual-seeming invitation, it hit her, like a knife slipped beneath her ribs to an unguarded heart. There had been polite Career alliances between One and Four in the past, and Two as well, but of course those dissolved quickly—allies of strength and convenience, and for mentors, standing apart from the nine pathetically hopeless districts. This was something different. Annie asking Cashmere to come visit, to see her home—this wasn’t cordial professionalism. Her mind shied away from the word _friendship_ because the Academy had beaten it into her—literally, even—that a cadet, a tribute, a victor, had no friends. If she survived the arena, she’d have colleagues among the other victors, respect and support and trust. But even among them there had been a coolness like snow-fed springs. They all had learned that to let anyone too close was foolishness. Haymitch Abernathy hadn’t learned that lesson until after his Games. Chantilly had learned it to her cost by letting Niello become something far more than her Capitol-mandated husband, and her kids become more than an expected price. Even Cashmere had failed too, by not being willing to let go of Gloss—even now. 

If it was between her and Gloss, her heart would immediately leap towards saving her brother’s life, every damn time, even if rationally it was better for her to survive. If it was between a bigger strategic victory and Gloss, it would be hard as hell to justify sacrificing him for some greater good. It galled her to admit it, but maybe she and Katniss weren’t totally unalike in that. Though if there was one thing that Cashmere was sure had been real about the girl, it was love for her sister. No good it did in the end given the younger Everdeen—Rose, was it?—died down in that canyon in the replacement Quell. But in the still silent privacy of her heart, Cashmere could be glad, if only for a moment, the girl hadn’t lived to see that.

Then Brutus was there, looking down at the two of them from his lofty six foot four, giving a low rumbled grunt of greeting. “Breaktime’s a bit longer. Lyme’s on the radio chattering up a storm,” he said dryly. “Apparently they got some new info in from their spies,” the awkward distaste was there in the man’s tone no matter how he tried to hide it, “in the Capitol.”

“Ah, really now? What have you got for us?” Annie cued him politely. She’d always noticed the southern districts seemingly had more of a knack for that, in all their people. They’d deliberately taught the art of meaningless conversation and flattery at the Academy.

“Yep,” Brutus answered laconically. Obviously he’d heard the initial part of the call and Lyme had delegated him to come relay the news. Cashmere hid her amusement at that. No secret who wore the trousers in that relationship, though she was pretty damn sure Brutus actually enjoyed it. “From the Detention Center,” he went on. “They just got a couple of their agents in on a duty rotation.”

She didn’t dare speak, or even breathe too loudly, for fear it might somehow shut him up or chase him off. She only stared, willing him with all her heart and mind and soul to go on. Damn awkward Brutus, she couldn’t even tell after all these years whether it was hesitation from bad news or him just disliking conversations that might spark any kind of emotion. “Gloss and Finnick are alive,” he cut right to the point, and she heard a low moan by her side, the sound of an indrawn breath of fear held for months finally released. It was an instinct even older and far more natural than the Academy, all that training about casual-seeming charming and seductive touches, that made her reach over, squeezing Annie’s arm with her hand, realizing after she did it that the force of her own emotion might have left bruises. “And they think this might be a good chance to get them out.”

“I’m going,” Annie burst out fiercely, on her feet in an instant. “Any team that’s going, I won’t be left off it.”

“Me either,” she said, unable to even be irritated that Annie beat her to the punch, because Gloss was alive, and they had a chance now.

“That’s why Lyme’s arguing right now,” Brutus said dryly. “All sorts of bitching from Thirteen about the necessity of disguises and suicide pills and I don’t even _know_ what else, but she knew you both would want on it. And you’re close enough to join the rescue team, and she’ll tell ‘em you know the Capitol and that’ll be a help….”

“Cashmere knows it, anyway, I haven’t been in the Capitol enough,” Annie said softly, as if sensing that a small part of Cashmere had silently made that exact angry protest, because Annie had the luxury of staying safe at home all those years. She’d felt the same about Sable too after the 71st, because Sable was supposed to be Cashmere’s ticket home. Resenting a cripple paralyzed from the waist down for not being Capitol-beloved enough to take Cashmere’s place as the Capitol’s new glamor girl—not exactly her finest hour. Though to be honest, Cashmere really wasn’t sure exactly when or what that had been, or if she’d even had a truly fine hour yet in her life.

She made a silent apology to Sable for that, sure she’d condescended to the poor girl in the years since out of her rage and frustration. Sable clearly got the picture. People rarely saw her, even the other victors. “We won’t make it a big point to remind them of that,” Cashmere told Annie wryly, trying to convey as best she could that she’d more or less forgiven Annie for that, and most of all, was really trying to forget it. “And well, ah, you’re not…” 

“We’re not Johanna,” Annie said without a trace of bitterness. Meaning, as victors, they were a bit more expendable. Cashmere suppressed a snicker—if she died, she was sure Plutarch could probably make an utterly sappy propo out of it.

He hesitated, gestured gingerly towards them. “Do you want us to come with you too? Hannibal’s there, after all…and Baria.” He almost flinched saying the latter name, guilt practically dripping from his words.

Annie glanced towards Cashmere. Lyme and Brutus were hellraisers in battle, true enough, even past forty. But the risk of the Capitol gaining four more victor captives, as opposed to two—was it worth it? Besides, might those two not do better to stay here, push the civil unrest in Two as far as they could before winter stopped them? They always inspired the locals more than Cashmere or Annie could do, because people would listen to their native victors first. Their presence and leadership made it into a civil rebellion with Two having actual stakes in it, rather than a rebel invasion.

“Thanks,” she said, meeting Brutus’ eyes, actually meaning it. She hoped he could hear the truth of that in her voice and see it on her face. “But trust me, we’ll help look out for Hannibal and Enobaria.”

“The fight here needs you,” Annie concurred, already sliding the straps of her pack back over her shoulders and settling it over her back. “More than we do, much as the offer’s appreciated. Don’t take this as us rejecting the pack, huh?”

Brutus smiled slightly, his blue eyes almost eerily light in his red, wind-chapped face. “Figured you’d say that. And the pack always has to break up in the end, doesn’t it?” He reached out and clapped them both on the shoulder, a bluff, fond gesture. “Lyme’s getting details of where and when you’ll meet the strike team.”


	31. Chapter 31

By Cecelia’s reckoning, Lizzie must have stared at the cards in her hand for a good five minutes now, but she couldn’t be sure. Time had long since lost all meaning here in this prison. Just because they were in finer quarters now with little luxuries like regular showers and clean clothes and warm blankets and playing cards and books didn’t mean that the hours and days and weeks didn’t pass in one continuous stultifying blur, and without sunlight or even a clock, keeping time was next to impossible. It could be September or January outside for all she knew now, and the guards certainly weren’t telling her anything.

 _They’ve decided we weren’t involved,_ Niello had explained softly one morning as the two of them were neatly folding the laundry delivery to this contained area of the Detention Center and doling out the clothing again. _So they’ll keep us comfortable until Snow finally decides we’re no longer useful to his plan._

Even talking about dying, his hands were still steady as he neatly folded a shirt the drab color of dust, though the slide of her fingertips over the fabric told her that even here in prison clothing there was subtle Capitol privilege, the cotton such a fine, soft weave.

 _No chance of them trading us?_

Niello slanted her a look that smacked of nothing but glum exhaustion. _If the war’s going well, the rebels won’t give Snow anything simply for some victors. If it’s not going well, then I imagine Snow will do for the lot of us anyway once he catches the rest rather than risk another victor-led rebellion, don’t you think?_

She’d seen the flash of fear in him, and realized anew that it wasn’t for him, that he’d already written his own life off. But he had children he must be terrified for, just as she was, and if Chantilly was still alive that was another thing. Cheeks burning, she’d reached for Gloss’ shirt and folded it. She was no Career to understand all these schemes and how the insanity of the Capitol really worked. She’d once been Cecelia Vechter, an Eight girl who’d had the good, or bad, luck to survive an arena whose distinguishing feature was the invisible menace of disease and poison. The only person she’d killed was the Two girl, ravaged by a sickness that caused her body to explode into green-black boils the size of Cecelia’s fist, weak enough that a half-starved and fatigued Eight girl who’d somehow barely survived her own devastating fever could stand and fight and kill, though her muscles were so weary as to barely obey her. Not a popular Games—not nearly enough blood. She was lucky that the boredom of it, her marriage to Roy that New Year’s and then arriving to the 62nd already with a significant pregnant belly on her, and the lingering fever-pockmarks all over her body that Remake couldn’t quite erase, were all off-putting to potential buyers. 

She’d always been a victor people in the Capitol rarely noticed—sweet, motherly, unassuming Cecelia, whom everybody liked in a bland sort of way. That was just fine with her. She’d seen what Capitol adoration meant for others: Haymitch, Enobaria, Wy, Finnick, and others. She was Cecelia Darzi now, just an Eight woman trying to forget the Games with a husband and three kids—though that was no husband now and only two kids alive, the guards had cheerfully told her back in those dank underground cells, and she had no reason to doubt the truth of it. She’d seen enough of how the Capitol worked, and she couldn’t bear to hope that they were wrong. If they wanted to really screw with her head, they’d have told her that they were all dead, wouldn’t they? Besides, she couldn’t doubt it now. Not when the Twelve girl, Madge, had confirmed that replacement Games had happened, and that her family had been executed, and presumably everyone else’s too.

She couldn’t think of Corduroy and Lowell without agony, Low in particular because of her child dying in the cruelty of the Games—she couldn’t even ask Madge about it. Victors didn’t ask anyway, but she couldn’t hear how Low had died there, or more likely Madge hadn’t even noticed one Eight boy, not even thirteen yet.

That had been her worst nightmare from the moment she’d found out she was pregnant for the first time. Every breath her little boy, and then later her two girls, had taken was fraught with that fear, and every day now she fought the horror of imagining the guards telling her that Lacey and Linsey were dead now too. Warm blankets and clean clothes meant nothing against the fear. Even Niello’s assurances that Snow intended to keep the younger kids related to the victors alive and send them to Two as future Peacekeepers couldn’t banish the nightmare visions entirely. Not that she imagined Niello lied, but she didn’t trust a word Snow said—couldn’t.

When Haymitch came to her at the Training Center, she’d let him talk her into that plan of his, clever Haymitch all too sober since last summer with his keen eyes and his keen words she’d remembered from him as a younger man back in full force, spinning Cecelia a tale of a softer, better future. A world where Lowell and Linsey and Lacey would never endure Reaping Day, would never go into an arena. That had been worth fighting for—though she hadn’t even gotten that right, hadn’t done what she’d agreed upon with Haymitch. Katniss Everdeen died in the arena before Cecelia ever found the alliance, and she’d only even found Chaff barely a couple hours before it all went down. As usual, she’d been a failure as a tribute, and survived mostly by happenstance.

Still, the war started anyway, that much the guards had let slip. No details on how it happened, though Finnick said his interrogator had stupidly said something about them all rallying behind Johanna Mason when they questioned him. Cecelia couldn’t see it easily, but Finnick was convinced, and well, he’d always known the Seven victor far better than Cecelia. Johanna hadn’t exactly made herself well-liked, and in terms of putting in effort, Cecelia would be the first to admit she’d focused far more on home life than the annual hellish pilgrimage to the Capitol and all it meant. It was her due to take it on, though. Georgette finally got to retire home—the first Eight victor to do so, given Taffeta’s being kept up in the Capitol as Solonius Trove’s mistress all these years—and Cecelia took her place in Mentor Central alongside poor Woof, and it would be that way until in another twenty or thirty years yet another unfortunate Eight somehow managed to scrape up a victory, and a long line of dead tributes before that point. 

No, the vision Haymitch offered hadn’t needed to be all that seductive to convince Cecelia. Aside from worrying about her own children’s future, watching other peoples’ children die for the last thirteen years hadn’t done her any favors either. Twelve and Eight were about equally hopeless in the Games, and if there was any other victor who took that loss as hard as her, it was Haymitch Abernathy. A childless bachelor, and he might have tried to hide it underneath alcohol and sarcasm, but she read the grief for those children there easily. It was in him as it was in her, clear and bright and permanent as the stain of madder red. She’d spent her childhood after school toiling in the dye works, come home too many nights with stained fingers, the red always fading slowest. Funny thing—the blood from Lucretia from Two had washed off her hands far more easily than that dye, though the stain on her heart and soul was set for good.

If anyone else had asked, some rabble-rouser or fiery-eyed revolutionary spouting big ideals and not understanding Cecelia’s reality, it wouldn’t have meant nearly so much. She could have turned down Katniss in her indignant teenage naïveté, even if some part of her would have smiled at that wholehearted, uncomplicated passion, and Johanna's fierce, often aimless rage would have been equally easy. But Haymitch talking to her about that freedom from fear for her children and everyone else’s—that idea meant something deeply personal to him too, even if he wouldn’t admit it to her.

Being here wasn’t the worst, because this was only reaping her consequences. It was the knowledge that Roy had died for loving her, and that Lowell had died for being her son, and that Linsey and Lacey might still die as well that weighed on her.  
Lizzie still made no move, and Cecelia decided to not say anything. It wasn’t that the Six victor was that utterly intent on poker. The faraway look on those narrow, aquiline features said plenty—she wasn’t looking at her cards. “Mind if we join you ladies?” Finnick said, gesturing to the table with his remaining hand, Gloss at his side.

“Yeah, sure, it’s a free country,” Lizzie replied distantly, and then let out a cackle of laughter, slapping her cards down on the table, jolted back to reality and obviously amused by her own words. “At least, we’re hoping it will be, right?” Through the curtain of her long, straight black hair, she looked slyly at one of their Peacekeeper guards, and a twitch of her mouth betrayed her annoyance at getting no reaction.

Gloss chuckled softly, brushing his lank, too-long golden hair from his eyes and pulling a chair out. Cecelia resisted the urge to cluck her tongue, glad as ever that they’d given her the modesty of a headscarf again. Maybe even more than a shower or a blanket, that meant something. The practicality of not having her hair falling in her eyes all the time was a blessing as well, but mostly the constant discomfort of parading around bareheaded, and so many men and women seeing what only family ought. But that brought a swell of memory: Lacey’s tiny fingers knitted through Cecelia’s hair, her baby girl’s laughing face and bright eyes. Roy’s fingers tenderly stroking her hair for the first time on their wedding night and the look of wonder on his face—as if he hadn’t seen it on television just a few months ago when the Capitol forced her to expose her head to the entire nation and hacked half of her hair off for “style”. She’d felt clean again that night with Roy. Unconsciously, her fingers rose to the headscarf, nervously checking to see that it was still there and still tied tight.

Then Cecelia heard the metallic _whisht_ of the door to the prison wing opening behind her—which meant either mealtime or a guard change. She’d guess that it was time for a meal. Everything exploded then in a burst of light and a boom of sound, unbearable in its intensity. The entire room seemed to tilt sickeningly through her brightness-dazzled vision, and Cecelia felt like a bobbin on a loom, spinning around and around in a blur. She couldn’t tell exactly how long before she felt the cold metal against her cheek and realized that she was on the hard metal floor, legs still tangled in the chair legs, her left wrist bent beneath her and clearly broken from the raging pain, and she couldn’t hear or see clearly and the world was still spinning and sun-spotted. The dark, rusty taste of blood filled her mouth—must have bit her cheek when she hit the floor. 

The sounds of voices yelling names and commands and the sound of bullets punctured through finally. Pushing herself up only with effort, one-handed and avoiding the throbbing fire raging through her left arm, she now made out the grey figures rushing through the cell block. One stopped and crouched in front of her, a short, squat bobbin of a girl, barely looked eighteen, but the grim resolve in those dark eyes was anything but childish. The blood stood out stark against her cream-pale cheek—was it this girl’s or someone else’s? “Ya Sahseelyah Daahzee?” It took Cecelia a moment with her dazed wits, distorted hearing, and that odd, nasal accent to recognize her own name. 

“Yes,” she replied, then again, a bit stronger, “yeah, I’m Cecelia Darzi.”

A flash of excitement crossed the girl’s face in a broad grin, and now she suddenly looked younger, like a child eager to bring something wonderful home to her mother. “I’m Lieutenant Winter Sano. Let’s get you out of here. C’mon.” Getting her shoulder underneath Cecelia’s arm, they made their way towards the door—the open door, the door Cecelia figured she’d never walk through again except to go to her execution.

She saw Cashmere rushing around then, dressed in the same drab grey uniform as Lieutenant Sano, hair sleeked back in a ponytail. The least stylish and deliberate she’d ever seen Cashmere Donovan, but then, she’d spent however long now seeing the equally glamorous Gloss disheveled and nonchalant about it. But the rifle in Cashmere’s hand, and the butterfly swords strapped to her back, said she meant business. “Gloss!” she yelled frantically into the din.

“He was sitting with me,” Cecelia told her, pointing back towards the table where they’d been sitting. 

Just then Cecelia heard and answering call of, “Cash!” Even hustled towards the door by Sano as she was, she glanced back to see the brother and sister embracing, laughing and weeping all at once. Maybe they’d made no friends in Mentor Central all those years, though she’d admit she hadn’t much tried, but she’d come to like Gloss, and chances were Cashmere had more to her as well. It did her heart good to see that kind of unfettered joy, regardless.

She had no idea how they’d managed to land a hovercraft on the roof of the Detention Center, and she wasn’t sure she cared. It meant that all the victors plus their rescuers had only to go up a few flights of steps, and they were in the air within minutes, even before they’d all strapped down securely—being one-handed didn’t help that venture either. The force of a turn threw Taffeta, seated to Cecelia’s right, into Cecelia which jostled her broken wrist and she stifled a scream, biting it down into a low moan as her stomach lurched. “I’m so sorry,” Taffeta said, reaching out and putting a hand on Cecelia’s shoulder. “Let me help you.” Sitting back, she gratefully let the older Eight victor do up the harness for her.  
A few minutes later a stern-faced middle-aged man with impeccable posture came back and informed them, “We’ve cleared Capitol airspace and they didn’t set off an alarm yet. So you can relax a bit.”

“How did you get this thing in?” Niello asked Cashmere, waving a hand to indicate the hovercraft.

Cashmere grinned with delight. “We managed to get the proper clearance codes, convince them we were a prisoner transport. Not a lie.” She saw old Cotton chuckling at that, a wry smile from Spark, and heard the ripple of laughter from others.

“So most of us are here—where are Haymitch and Johanna, anyway?” Finnick broke in abruptly. Seeing his missing left hand suddenly made the pain in her wrist seem more bearable. At least she’d keep her hand. He hadn’t been so lucky with his arena injury.

“They’re at Milltown in District Nine right now, along with Blight and Clover,” Annie replied, looking at him with a mixture of anxiousness and relief, her green eyes wide in her round moon face. “Lyme and Brutus are fighting over in District Two. You know they’d have been here if they could have, Finn. They’ll be glad to hear you’re OK.”

Finnick nodded, visibly relaxing like a loom with the tension suddenly released. “Of course.” 

There wasn’t much else to do then. She listened for a while as Annie and Cashmere told them about District Thirteen and the life they could expect there. It didn’t much matter in details, did it? It was a life of freedom, and Linsey and Lacey were there—Chaff was caring for them, Annie told her.

She’d have to find a way to thank him for that. “His kids?” she asked Annie softly, across the way.

Annie looked down, shook her head wearily. “His two oldest are gone—one in the wave of executions, one in the replacement Quell. But his youngest, we got back along with your two. I mean…Haymitch, Johanna, Blight, and Clover did,” she corrected herself. “I wasn’t there.”

“And you’re here now and they’re not,” Taffeta answered her simply, and Annie gave her a smile for that.

Taffeta had lost a son too in this war. Most people probably didn’t remember that, thinking of the executions in the districts. But then, most people had counted Taffeta as something neither fish nor fowl for quite some time now, ever since Solonius Trove took her as his mistress and forced her to live in the Capitol. Only the other Eight victors—Woof in particular, who’d lived the even worse horror of the pre-Snow victor experience as Taffeta had—stayed the most faithful to her. She was one of theirs, no matter what she’d been forced to do, and obviously it was her blood that had run true in Cinna, not Trove’s.

She reached over with her good right hand and took Taffeta’s, moved by the fierce sympathy welling up in her. Taffeta had no chance to grieve either, with the news that Cinna was dead delivered dryly to her only after she was in captivity. Yes, Cinna had been a man past thirty rather than a child of twelve like Lowell, and maybe he hadn’t been conceived in love, but he’d been borne and raised in it. Taffeta’s grief spoke to hers, the weight of a loss of a firstborn, a son, shared. Somehow, that made the burden of it just a little more bearable.

Nobody in Eight ended up alone, cast-out, unless it was for a crime. Children went to the community home only if the entire extended family line was ended, which was a blessed rarity. Uncles, aunts, cousins—they wove the fabric of family in Eight strong and tight. But chances were Taffeta’s family were all gone now, and the thought of this woman, her fellow Eight victor, her fellow mother left alone and bereft struck her to the core. She had lost people so dear to her, and it pierced her and always would, but Taffeta had truly lost everything. 

A woman nearly sixty now, coffee-and-cream-skin youthful still from the demands of her keeper, hair gone to silver—she’d been little more than a girl when she won the Games, when President Mackenzie auctioned her off to Solonius Trove who’d decided that one night, or even a summer, wasn’t enough for him, that he had to possess her for always. Shorn of a son, shorn of her home and her people, shorn even the simple dignity of the headscarf she hadn’t been permitted to wear in forty years now. 

Seeing one of the Thirteen soldiers pass by, she saw he wore a red bandana around his left biceps. It looked clean and bright, and that was what mattered. “Sorry, but can I use that?” she asked him, letting go Taffeta’s hand. 

“What, do you need a hankie?” he said, giving her a bemused smile. “Ah, you might as well have it. Good ol’ Phoenix red—join the rebellion.” He untied it and handed it to her.

Fumbling a little, one handed, she undid the tightly rolled armband and instead neatly redid it into a simple triangle, one half over the other. She placed it in Taffeta’s gnarled hand. She couldn’t restore stolen things, but she could offer what she had. “My family is your family now too. And I know Linsey and Lacey will be so happy to meet you.” Already her own happiness at that felt like she could barely contain it. To see them again, hold them again—free from the danger of captivity, she’d finally be able to mourn Roy and Lowell, but she’d first allow herself to feel the joy of having her daughters back in her arms.

Taffeta’s eyes shone too bright for a moment, green-gold and luminous. But her hands were surprisingly steady as she reached up and neatly tied the bandana around her hair, as if she’d done it every day of her life. “Thank you, Cee,” she said softly, reaching up and touching Cecelia’s cheek.

~~~~~~~~~~

In the gathering dusk, a brisk winter snow fell over Milltown, soft and silent. The sheer absence of sound, after days of a constant cacophony of explosions and shouting and screams and moans and rifle fire, seemed almost eerie. 

As Haymitch watched, stretching his aching back and shoulders and legs, the snow brushed gently against his face, fast numbing his skin in the cold, tickling against his nose and eyelashes. It chilled his already exhaustion-clumsy hands before he stuffed them in his pockets. 

The snow blanketed everything in a shroud of clean, pure white and it covered all the horror. It fell over the still-smoldering ruins in places where Capitol Peacekeepers had used grenades and bombs on mills and storage buildings rather than surrender control to the rebels. It fell over the rivers and pools of congealed blood still in the streets, and the bodies still lying there held fast by cold and death into whatever position they’d died in. It fell over the jumbled heaps of scavenged possessions of the Millton natives who’d suffered the loss of their homes during the battle, and as he watched even now down Grindstone Alley, he could see some of them picking through the rubble still so they could take what few things they had left and go huddle in the communal shelter set up for now in one of the old mills. It fell over some of the captured Peacekeepers set to work as obligatory labor, helping dig out survivors and bodies and everything else, the front and back of their white uniform tunics and jackets clearly marked with a large “P” in blood-red ink, as the rebels’ Peacekeeper allies did their best to shed the uniform entirely in favor of new clothing. 

He stared at one Peacekeeper team busy retrieving bodies—in those thick overcoats and ragged scarves, he couldn’t even say if the two of them were men or women. The “P” stood out stark against the white fabric, edges of the paint blurred as if the letter itself were slowly bleeding. Red as the marks worn by the other side, the rebel Peacekeepers on that train in Two. Red as the blood gushing out of Apollonia’s thigh, trickling through his fingers as he tried to stop the bleeding on her, and on too many people these last days. Red as the speckles of it on his shirt cuffs, and the sodden bandages that they burned in a trash barrel behind the old flour warehouse set up as a field hospital, because the fabric was so soiled there was no way to get them clean enough to be of use again. They’d run out of sterile gloves the first day. Nobody in Thirteen had planned for this much human wreckage, and even yesterday’s resupply hovercraft hadn’t had more gloves to send. At least they hadn’t run out of morphling or sutures or the really important things. 

So there was blood on his hands again, soaking in as a web of sticky red lines, but at least the doctors and medics all scrubbed scrupulously clean between patients. Soap wasn’t in shortage either in Milltown, and it was the good, harsh lye soap that cleaned everything. He scrubbed with more vigor than most, to the point that Johanna had told him, quietly but sternly, that taking off his own skin wasn’t going to help anyone. Every time he cleaned his hands he reminded himself it was blood from trying to save lives, rather than the taking of them, but sometimes with the smells, and the moans, it still hit him with the force of a sledgehammer, leaving him shaking and needing to grab some fresh air.

Deep breaths of winter air, even laced still with smoke and the smell of roasted grain, cleared out the taste of air filled with the blood and rot and shit and fear of hundreds of wounded and dying. He couldn’t say how many had died in combat in five days of fighting here in Milltown, from the breach in the wall and taking the place building by building—hundreds for sure, maybe into the thousands? As to how many had died of wounds out there in the street, and how many had died since in the hospital, he wouldn’t even speculate. Leave that to the listmakers later. They all started to blur in the frenzy and exhaustion of trying to save lives, which was a mercy, because he’d carried all those dead tributes crystal-clear for so long. But there were a few that would haunt him anyway. Dead kids in particular. A little girl with half her face perfect, the other half blown off—she’d lingered two days. He’d looked at her and helplessly thought of Posy.

Breathing in and out, stretching his back again, he heard the sound of footsteps beside him. He didn’t even have to look to know who it would be, recognizing the sound of that particular tread, and a battered tin mug entered his vision as Johanna shoved it at him. “Here. We both could use some.”

The coffee offered in the medics’ tiny rest area was brewed down to a vaguely tarry sludge, but it was piping hot, and he hadn’t had coffee since leaving the raiders down south—he took a sip and the heat of it and the kick of the caffeine helped warm him through, chasing away some of the smell and the sound and the sight of pain and hopelessness and dying that pervaded the air like a physical weight inside the building between rows and rows of injured and dying and dead. He passed the mug back to Johanna, both of them so bone weary after hours in the field hospital that his shaking, exhaustion-cramped fingers didn’t want to let go of the mug, and she almost fumbled in catching the handle. 

“You want to claim a couple hours of rest?” he offered, brain so fogged by this time he couldn’t even tell how many hours straight they’d both been working—it called back to mind all those years of hitting the booze, of finding that place where it all ran together and nothing could hurt, and he’d reached that point hours and hours ago anyway because there were so damn many of them still waiting their turn in the aftermath of the carnage, and all he could do was go to the next, and the next, and try to save them or take away the pain, and sometimes by the time a medic got there they were already dead, and sometimes they were so hopeless that he had to just mark them with a black chit—another hard choice so like mentoring with another life written off in favor of those he had a better chance to save—and sometimes, though it felt far, far too few, they actually managed to do some good. 

“No,” she said, shaking her head and handing back the coffee, “I’m not quitting till we’re through—how ‘bout you, old man, you need some rest?”

He couldn’t help but smile tiredly at her teasing, but told her, “Nah.” He’d as soon keep busy, even if he dropped in his tracks. There were those crates stacked in the supply room, full of bottles of raw Nine rye moonshine they were using so liberally to disinfect everything, and he hadn’t seen them that way yet in the sheer frenzy of it all, but eventually the calm would arrive and everything would catch up with him. Dead faces, severed limbs, the smell of blood, that little girl. How fucking _easy_ it would be to slip a bottle into his coat pocket and find a quiet corner and drink himself comfortably numb, and damn anyone who said he hadn’t earned that.

“So we’re slinging some real shitkicker hootch around that hospital like it’s the worst dive in all the districts—we’ve still got crates and crates of it. You gonna pick up a bottle when this is all over?” Trust Johanna to be that direct about it, though strangely, in an offhanded way that didn’t come across as judgmental. He couldn’t quite meet her eyes as she handed back the coffee, a little unsettled that she seemed to read his mind.

In his mind he pictured Peeta, Vick, Posy, Lindy—but not their current selves, confused and still adjusting and a bit scared, but older, happy and in a world where July meant nothing more than blazing sticky midsummer heat, where so many more possibilities for life and love and happiness might make themselves available and they could thrive rather than merely get by.

But he was the one fighting for that world for them, and their need of him was a responsibility as much as their care for him and his for them was a joy, because that was what having kids meant. It was Johanna that had stood beside him, supported him, fought by his side, an equal partner, and that was something entirely different from the kids, and different even from how it had been in years gone by between them.

He glanced over at Johanna, thinking back to her ferocity as she urged people to not give up, whether on the battlefield or lying broken on a blanket in the hospital. He could imagine her all too easily as an old woman—gone grey, that deep golden skin wrinkled, her body slightly stooped. Perhaps she’d walk with a cane then, and chances were she’d insist on carving it herself, stubborn as she was. But those bright eyes would be the same, looking at the world and daring it to challenge her, ready to throw her entire will behind whatever stirred her, regardless of the difficulty. No, she’d always be fierce and willful and brave and a little impulsive. Like one of those mighty oaks they grew out in Seven—it might get a bit gnarled, but all the more formidable for its years.

He smiled as he saw that future Johanna in his mind, and it was only in recognizing the fact that he imagined her old and maybe a bit crotchety with a sort of wistful enjoyment and a wish that he might see it rather than annoyance that another notion came over him. It was something that had hidden there, like a wraith seen only out of the corner of his eye, sliding out of his reach every time he might have looked that way. A ghost, a shadow, but now it stood there clear as daylight. Nothing like it had been with Briar so long ago, where it seemed like everything changed in an instant and suddenly his life was utterly transformed and so was he, but he wasn’t the naïve boy he’d been back then when even emotions were so much simpler.

 _Oh, shit._ He felt like he’d been stunned, though the greater part of it was fear and the sense of bemused regret at his own foolishness—she’d be his steadfast friend and that might well be enough to help keep him away from the bottle, but even if things had suddenly shifted and re-aligned, there was still so much in his soul missing or broken or deeply in question, and it wasn’t like he could suddenly offer everything of himself to her, brave and whole and clean and uncomplicated. Besides, she could—should—do better, and it wasn’t real for her anyway, and he’d learned better than to keep beating himself to shreds against hopeless obstacles, hadn’t he? He drank another swig of the coffee, bitter and black as his own dark turn of mind, and handed it back to her, careful in that moment to keep his fingers from brushing hers, because there was a sudden surge of longing in his damn traitor mind to take her hand in his, and reassure himself that difficult as it was right now, he wasn’t left to weather it alone. “I’ll be all right,” he told her quietly.

“You always had that on me,” she muttered, leaning back against the wall and brushing a hand over her face with a low sigh. The streetlight winked off her plain gold wedding ring. “You only ever really wanted to hurt yourself.”

“Give yourself some credit, c’mon,” he answered, suddenly uncomfortable at her tearing at herself like that hen he’d just been thinking about what a wreck he was. “You had reasons.”

“Don’t make excuses for me, I don’t want you protecting me,” she cut him off neatly. “Maybe I had my reasons, fine. But I hurt people as my first move, and I liked it.”

“You liked feeling safe,” he corrected her. “I don’t think you enjoyed seeing them in pain.”

“Fair enough. Still didn’t think much of them. And I got there so damn fast. You had your glorious moments of being an asshole—more than a few—but not the same. You really always just wanted to be left alone.”

A weird feeling crept in, realizing suddenly that Johanna actually thought he was somehow better than her. “I gave up, though,” he reminded her quietly. He’d given up on himself, on his tributes, on anything and everything, because it was so much less painful to feel nothing, pain or hope or anything else. “Gave them everything, bit by bit, until they told me there was nothing worth taking left in me. You never did. You always fought.”

“And you’re not giving up now, are you?” she retorted, pushing herself off the wall and facing him, hands on her hips.

“And you’re not rushing to attack people, are you?” he inquired archly in return. “So maybe we’ve both gotten a little less screwed up.” He took another swig of the coffee, noting it had gotten cool and dense in a hurry, trying to not think about the fact that her lips had been on it moments ago.

“Well, hasn’t this been another touching moment with the Abernathys? Aurelius will be so fucking proud.” She reached for the mug and he handed it over to her, smiling wryly at her quip. 

She was still a work in progress, true. But he could see that woman clearly, the Johanna that should have been, just as he’d imagined her thirty years from now. And what about him? She was right. He’d been jealous of his solitude. Blight called him out on it bluntly, Chaff had joked about it over the years. He’d pushed away a teenage Johanna who’d needed him—he’d been right that he shouldn’t be her lover, but he’d been too distant and too harsh in how he’d told her that, wanting her to take comfort from him only on his terms, not wanting the threat of how sympathy and understanding for her could crack his hard-won armor right open. Hell, he’d been much the same with Katniss—wary, angry, a little wild—and he hadn’t even screwed her. He couldn’t make things right there, but Johanna-the-girl had become Johanna-the-woman, his wife for what it was worth, and he owed her better. “I shouldn’t have been that cold to you when you were a kid.” It was an apology long overdue, to his mind. Yes, she’d carelessly used him then and since, but he hadn’t opened himself up to being the truest kind of friend. They might have been closer to each other than anyone else, but they’d spent years and years cautiously circling each other, a pair of starving, injured wolves. “You needed someone and I shut you out.”

He loved her and it scared the hell out of him. But she wasn’t the only person who’d sneaked in on him, simply the one that now struck him so profoundly he couldn’t ignore it all. He could lie to himself, keep pretending that nothing mattered and it was all obligation and honor, or he could accept reality. He had people who needed him, who cared. A ma who loved him, in spite of it all, and even awkward as things were with Fog, the man gave a damn. Four kids who needed him to step up and be a better man, one who could stand strong enough to be the father than none of them ever really had, or had lost too young for it to hold weight. Johanna, for whatever role he could take for her—even if that as simply to be her best friend once it was all over.

He had family now, and the ties of that could either secure him or strangle him, as he chose. Surprisingly, he felt grateful that he could still feel something that deep and clear. It didn’t even matter whether she ever felt the same for him. She cared for him in some fashion, stood by him both on and off the battlefield. And to feel something like this, to find that capacity hadn’t been taken from him for good, was enough. He wasn’t fifteen anymore, thinking that to not be loved in return was the worst possible agony in the world. Then again, that fifteen-year-old would be appalled at the idea of realizing his feelings while dead on his feet and thinking about drinking and fresh from the horrifying carnage of the field hospital—silly child, that Haymitch would have imagined the quiet woods, something perfect. But it seemed fitting to have it come over him now, physically and emotionally hitting the bottom of the mine, and he could best see how much her being there and being concerned meant to him. This was when he needed her most, not peaceful days lying around in sunlit fields. 

It was a quieter, steadier feeling than those half-remembered days with Briar, but he wasn’t the boy he’d been, and Johanna wasn’t Briar either, and so all the better that it felt so different and didn’t readily carry those painful echoes. 

Love came with risks. So did this war they fought. If he could pick up a knife and a rifle to fight by Johanna’s side and try to make a better world for Posy and Vick and Peeta and Lindy, he could also fight to be the man they deserved. At least, he could try, and hope he wasn’t entirely beyond salvaging. That would be a personal victory over Snow and the Capitol, wouldn’t it? To become more like the man he would have been without them, a husband and father and friend, rather than a wary, solitary old drunk. He wasn’t young, he wasn’t clean and naïve and unscarred, but he wasn’t beyond starting anew, if he had the guts to try. At least he had people to fight for now, and that gave him a harder, keener edge. Johanna’s speech to the soldiers at the start of the fight had been right. A free man or woman fighting for the people they loved was more powerful than fighting for wealth or ideals or anything else. More powerful even than defiant rage. Katniss had been the one who’d started that ball rolling, but Johanna had certainly run more than her fair share with it now. 

She stayed silent for long enough he started to worry—never at a loss for words, Johanna seemed to have nothing to say to that. But then she spoke. “Like you said before, neither of us was exactly at our best then. But we’ve both gotten by at least some of it.” 

The affection in her words gave him a flicker of hope that the notion of her maybe reciprocating someday wasn’t totally insane. Curiosity had always been his downfall. So of course he looked inward cautiously—and was abruptly disappointed. Even loving her hadn’t unlocked everything. The idea of holding her while they slept still held more appeal than the most wanton, crazy sex. True, with her he wouldn’t consider it an ordeal like he had with the Capitolites, but it still felt more like sex would be the price for the touching. That fierce, unbearable surge of _wanting_ wasn’t there in the numbness. Not yet—maybe not ever?

Months ago, Aurelius had gone on and on about “right of existence as a sexual being” and “traumatized identity” and “image dissonance” and all sorts of other words Haymitch had pretty much nodded at and ignored, because they were pointless to him then. Should have paid more attention, but he couldn’t help a bleak hint of despair. So he loved her, could give her the best of him, but he couldn’t be much of a real husband to her, could he? They’d agreed it had to be about desire, pure and simple. He really ought to tell her that if he couldn’t fix it, it was OK if she found some satisfaction somewhere else, wouldn’t be fair to deny her that. Though the thought of her kissing someone else, smiling at him, touching him, waking up in his bed, actually made him want to punch the bricks and damn breaking his hand doing it. He hadn’t felt a rage like that since the early days of cutting off the booze.

 _You,_ he told himself, _are a fucking mess._ Then he gave a mental snort of disgusted amusement. As if that was news to him. _Better man, remember. Don’t just whine about it. Fix it._

“Yeah,” he answered her. The woman she’d been wouldn’t have fought so hard for so many strangers. He wouldn’t have stuck his neck out so boldly either, fearing it would get people killed or hurt. So maybe he’d found his courage again, and she’d found her compassion, and they were both the better for it.

“Yay for us. And we even had our celebratory shitty coffee.” She drained the last of the mug, hanging the handle over a crooked index finger. “If we stay out here much longer, our hands are gonna freeze, you know.”

He resisted the urge again to take her hands in his with the excuse of helping warm them up. “Yeah, ‘bout time we headed back in. Plenty more to do.” It would be hell in there, as usual, but he’d do it anyway. The wounded needed him, and it was a fight just as worthy of effort as the battle itself had been. They were all simply people, in pain and fear, who had friends and loved ones. And unlike the Games, he could make a difference here. At the end of it, exhausted and stricken as he would be, he’d be there for Johanna, and have her likewise there caring and concerned about him, and they’d both have thoughts of the kids who they’d hopefully get to talk to over the commpad. That was something stronger than liquor. They were his family now, and he would do his best to not let fear, or the Capitol, get in the way.  
Stopping at the supply room sink, he’d just handed Johanna the slimy bar of well-used lye soap when Blight came in. “Been looking everywhere for you two,” he grumbled.

Rubbing the soap into a thin lather over his hands and wrists, turning back his blood-freckled cuffs again, Haymitch didn’t look up as he answered, “We took a few minutes for coffee and some air.”

“Are they pissed about _that?_ ” Johanna said incredulously.

“No, nothing like that. But we got a comm from Thirteen with news.” Now Haymitch did turn, instinctively dreading bad news first—it was never good news, was it? But Blight’s craggy features looked ready to break into a delirious grin, and he relaxed. “The rescue team called in from the Capitol.”

“Finnick?” Johanna asked, voice unnaturally flat as she waited, body tense as a strung bow waiting to let loose the arrow.

Now Blight did grin. “Bastard lied, of course. He’s alive, Cecelia and Gloss and Enobaria too. They got ‘em all back, everyone from Mentor Central too, and they’re on their way to Thirteen now.” A weight he’d carried around since Plutarch ordered the hovercraft to leave suddenly lifted at that—the ones left behind were OK, he hadn’t sacrificed more of his friends in the end. Johanna yelped in joy at that and leaned over, hugging Haymitch tightly, her lye-sudsed hands clapping wetly on the back of his shirt, and he didn’t give a shit, hugging her back in return. For a fleeting moment he had the notion she’d never hugged him like this, a hug that wasn’t about fear and despair and the need for comfort, but he let it go, not wanting to overthink and worry in this moment. After good news like that, he felt like he could face just about anything, hours more of the field hospital included.


	32. Chapter 32

Citrine and Sardonyx hadn’t asked when Papa would be back, and there was clear wary coolness between them and Chantilly. That more than anything tore at Chantilly’s heart. True enough, she’d had to give them up to the Academy back in June to start their training as Chunks, the wryly derogatory term offered to any new prospect, from the lowest Bronze-rated all the way to Diamond-rated, until they reached twelve. That was when the first cuts happened, hence the name “Chunks”, the rough-hewn dim-hued lumps pulled from the earth before any cutting. Then they became Dulls, made to the proper form but still unpolished, sent for years of specialized training to become what was expected of a One tribute—a One victor. It was only at sixteen before the final few remaining became Gems, and only the top Diamond-rated had any hope there every year to become that year’s tributes.

But that had been so far in their future. They’d only been gone for three weeks before Reaping Day, and she’d seen them there in the square, lined up with all the other Academy children to witness the yearly ritual. But her babies were no longer hers. They belonged to One—and in the end, to the Capitol.

Three weeks at the Academy was more than enough to have already probably earned beatings and starvation for being six years old and frightened and lonely and wanting to go back home to their parents. All these years later, she hadn’t yet forgotten those hellish first weeks. And being the children of two victors would have afforded them few special favors when it came to punishments and ranking, but the unspoken understanding was there that legacy cadets couldn’t be permitted to fail unless they were totally hopeless. She wouldn’t have wanted it that way. She’d much rather that they failed and came home safe to her and Niel, far away from the Capitol’s greedy eyes and grasping hands.

They accepted her comfort for their nightmares only reluctantly, whereas before that summer they would have eagerly clung to her. She’d given them up to the Academy, and then they’d been forced to watch public executions, and imprisoned by the Capitol, probably told repeatedly that their mother was a traitor to boot and their father was under suspicion. They’d only been safe here in Thirteen for a few weeks, but the damage lingered. No wonder they looked at her warily, and she hated Snow all the more for making her give away her children and start driving that wedge between them.

Watching them play with Haymitch’s Posy, and Wiress’ nephew Telomere, at least there they seemed young, and happy. But those two kids had endured captivity with Trina and Donny, so they’d probably learned to trust and rely on each other. At least they hadn’t learned the Academy’s harshest, most basic lesson yet: _trust nobody too closely._

She’d learned that well. Even in Mentor Central, even in Victors’ Square, Niello, and then Jasper, could have to undercut her girl tribute in order to save their boy, and she might have to do the same to them. The fact it was a course of action agreed upon helped, but everything was ruthlessly rational. Maybe that was part of why she’d been so drawn to her fellow “Young Whores of Panem”: Blight, Clover, Angus, and Haymitch. They shared the misery of being sold, which bonded them together, but they too all came from the hopeless districts who couldn’t usually pose a threat to her tributes and her duty to One—Chaff and Wiress, same story without the selling of sex. 

Wiress came up to her, dark eyes thoughtful, grey-streaked brown hair falling messily from the clips that drew it back from her face. “New material’s the most plastic in form, you know,” she commented, nodding to the kids. “Johanna would say that about wood too.”

“Yes,” never the low-class ore miners’ _yep_ anymore, “and she’d throw some cursing in there while she was at it,” Chantilly answered her dryly, but the comment had its effect, cryptic as it might seem to a non-Three at first. In her odd way, Wiress reminded her that kids, young kids in particular, had the most ability to recover.

Wiress chuckled lowly at that, an even, measured sound issuing from her throat. “Odds with her would say, ‘Stop being so fucking weird, Nuts, and talk straight with us’.” Her mimicry of Johanna’s husky tones and round, lilting Seven accent was almost jabberjay-uncanny. But then Wiress had always been good at that, along with her peculiar forms of expression. 

“Sounds about right.” She reached over and pressed Wiress’ shoulder with her hand. “Thanks.” Wiress nodded at that and smiled, the motion crinkling the smile lines around her eyes, and the two of them continued to watch the kids at play. It was easier to lose herself in that, grateful that they could still be children there, carefree and happy, than to dwell on reality.

She’d been grateful for work today in Supply as a distraction, but now it was Reflection, and then after dinner there would be more time to think and think. The hours-long wait for the hovercraft to arrive, after they’d gotten the message that the prisoners were recovered safely, felt almost more interminable than all the weeks and months of not knowing. Cashmere had got Gloss back safe—not that Chantilly ever had much doubt of that, given how well she knew the girl she’d helped train for the arena. But her thoughts were all with Niello. He’d thrown himself on the sword for her, for the kids, and Career as they both were and used to swallowing hard decisions to achieve a particular aim, she couldn’t help but ache for all he must have endured. She’d never been apart from him since Cashmere’s victory, and slow and steady as they’d turned their marriage from a publicity necessity into something real, she hadn’t realized exactly how much she’d come to depend on him—as her partner in all things, not her senior co-mentor as it had been up until Jasper’s victory—until all of it got torn away. 

And then almost too suddenly, there he was coming into the Youth Play Center, tousled and tired-looking. Unshaven, with his beard, like his far too long shaggy hair, rather more silver than gold, and a One ought to be appalled to be seen like this but she didn’t care, didn’t care enough that she lunged for him which all his instincts could easily have still read as an attack after all those years of training. But he grabbed onto her, clutching her as tightly as she did him, her face buried in the crook of his shoulder, breathing in the scent of him. Not dirty—she remembered the scent of genuinely filthy bodies from Academy survival training and the arena—but the deep, musky scent of a man who probably hadn’t washed in a few days, and it didn’t matter at all. From how tightly he held her, rather than pushing her away, he didn’t resent her. 

As she clung to him, she heard Cecelia crying out the names of her kids as she rushed past Chantilly and Niello, and the sounds of other reunions. She felt someone bump her leg and heard Donny’s voice shyly saying, “Papa?” and then the two of them separated enough to let the kids in. For that moment, the four of them were whole again. She was so lucky compared to some of the other victors. She had her man, and both her children. Her family was a bit cracked and torn, but restored to her—there was still a chance of making it right.

Hours of bureaucracy—the infirmary, Records, Supply, haircuts, a belated meal back in the infirmary because getting everything else had overrun the dinner hour. They’d all have to wait for breakfast to discover the bewildering Thirteen system, with its gender and age-divided serving lines, and the servers carefully doling everything out measure by measure, by whatever caloric division they read on the pre-calculated digital ration card. 

She quickly bathed the kids as Niel shaved—they didn’t protest it or argue about bedtime. They never did now. They’d started to learn already, by the Academy or the Capitol or both, that defiance only got them punished. And too, Thirteen had already taught them that the schedule was utterly inflexible. But the wary silence was almost worse. Dressed for bed, they were let loose for a few minutes with their Thirteen-issued toys. Trina had rejected her stuffed bear with scorn, green eyes full of disdain. “That’s for babies.” That was the Academy all over. Donny clung to his bear all the tighter, though, and she’d woken up some mornings to find Trina clutching her bear too despite her boasts. 

For years and years she’d accepted the Academy philosophy—better to start young to produce the best, tributes capable of surviving the arena and keeping One in the Capitol’s good graces so they all wouldn’t starve like the outer districts did. But Trina and Donny were just tiny children. Cashmere and Gloss and so many others had been too. So she and Niel had been, long ago. 

Quickly stripping off her clothes and dropping them on the closed toilet seat, she slipped into the shower behind Niel, noticing him standing there with his arms braced against the wall, head down, just soaking in the spray. 

About to warn him to hurry up and scrub because of the limited timer on the water—even couples only got a little longer than single rations—she noticed the trembling of his shoulders. “Oh,” she murmured, stepping forward and wrapping her arms around him tightly. Feeling his too-thin body beneath her touch, the comfortable bit of softness that had settled on his belly beneath his well-tailored clothes was now gone. It wouldn’t have lasted here in Thirteen anyway, but she imagined him starved, probably beaten too, in that Capitol cell. No scars, but most of what had been done to him and her on the circuit hadn’t scarred in a way that showed either. “Oh, love. You’re safe now.” 

Those three final words seemed to crumble what shaky walls he had left. He turned to her then, hands clutching her arms tight enough to bruise for a moment before he caught her up in a hug of his own, chin resting on her shoulder. The small moment of pain didn’t matter. He’d suffered far more than her, and besides, she’d left her mark on him plenty of nights, caught up in the intensity of feeling. But it wasn’t sex he needed now, as she couldn’t even tell his tears against her skin from the fresh water of the shower. But at least he still easily turned to her, unlike the kids. There would be time to talk about Donny and Trina later, and let him talk about what had happened to him if he wanted, but in this moment, she wouldn’t make demands. Sometimes the best thing a person could do for the pain was hold on, be there, and say nothing.

She scrubbed his body carefully as he let it all out, one hand over his mouth muffling the sound of it so presumably the kids and neighbors wouldn’t hear, and then quickly washed up as well. He managed smiles and kisses for the kids, and they surprised her by accepting it readily from her too. The lights went out, and she moved closer to him. “Snow’s gone mad for real,” he murmured into the darkness, and somehow it didn’t shock her that he’d manage to talk strategy despite the horror. He was Career, even as she was, and they’d both mastered the art of letting the pain out in one quick, private flurry so that they could get back to business.

So she’d respect that by meeting him on that level, rather than pushing him on his captivity. “Did he say anything that could be useful?”

“He only called me into the office a couple of times. Once he decided I really was just a poor duped innocent who knew nothing, unfortunately, our conversations stopped.” Now a trace of humor entered his voice.

“Consummate actor as ever,” she said dryly, but she was smiling in the darkness all the same.

He rolled onto his side, bed rustling as he did so, and she could hear him breathing in the darkness, the sound blessedly slow and even. “Dear, I was getting final polish for my Games while you were still a cute little newbie Chunk. I’ve got decades of practice on keeping cover.”

“I know you do.” And they were lucky he did.

“He mentioned something about training new agents to get close to the rebellion, so we may want to alert whatever intelligence network on that. I don’t have more detail than that.”

“Ah. Well, we’ve got the head of rogue Peacekeepers as a spymaster here. Good man for the job. But now,” she reached out and gently placed her fingers across his lips, silencing him, “be quiet and sleep, Niel. Really, it’ll keep till morning.”

He chuckled lowly at that, and she heard that sound with gratitude. They hadn’t broken him. Gold was a soft metal, but right below that veneer, there was pure steel. Loving Niel was a gift that had come to her late, so unexpected, and she’d been lucky that their publicity move had become something so much more than two retired victor-whores past their prime agreeing to keep company with each other’s secrets and sorrows rather than expose anyone else to the dark rot at the heart of the Games. But maybe with him safe now they could both fight for the world where their children would simply be kids, not a demanded tribute to the Capitol expected even before their conception. Maybe when they became teenagers she could worry about them learning geology rather than learning how to kill and to seduce. 

Two days passed, and she wouldn’t say everything eased, but Niello seemed to restore a piece of things that let the twins relax a bit more. “Papa and I never wanted to let either of you go,” she told them, and while Donny melted first, always the gentler of the twins, in her daughter’s green eyes she started to see the bloom of hope that maybe she’d been frightened beyond measure, but maybe she hadn’t been betrayed by those she loved.

“I don’t like it here, Mama,” she whispered, looking carefully around. She’d learned to not speak too loud, apparently, and Chantilly’s heart broke all over again. “Wanna go home.”

“I know, baby,” she said, smoothing a hand over Trina’s brown hair, cupping the little girl’s chin in her hand. “But at least we’re safe here. The people here won’t hurt you, I promise.”

Warily, Trina nodded at that. Suddenly Lindy gave a happy shriek, clutching her bear by an arm, and started toddling towards the door as fast as her chubby little legs could carry her. Chantilly looked over just in time to see Haymitch there the moment that Lindy flung herself at his legs.

He neatly intercepted it and scooped the little girl up, jostling her up and down gently for a moment. “What’ve they been _feeding_ you anyway, kiddo?” he drawled, as Lindy giggled, and Chantilly saw the softness in his expression as he looked down at his foster daughter.

Johanna appeared behind him, giving a wave of acknowledgment. “Well, looks like she’s found her favorite again,” she said dryly, pausing to tousle Lindy’s hair with a quick smile. Chantilly noticed that Posy only seemed to perk up once she heard Johanna’s voice.

Putting Lindy down, sending her back towards Cecelia’s watchful eye and Lacey, Haymitch spied Chantilly and gave her a nod. Well, obviously he wanted a word. Not that she had much to report on about Thirteen, given that Coin restricted her from most things, but at least she could tell him Niel’s information before his father beat her to the punch.

Finding a bench on one side of the Play Center, she gestured him towards it. Same drab grey as every other wall, chair, and floor, and would it really kill them to brighten it up a little for the children? He sat down a bit heavily, sagging into himself, elbows resting on his knees. She looked him over—dark circles under his eyes from sleepless nights, and several days’ growth of black stubble that gave him the look of some untidy bandit. There were the puckered, black lines of stitches holding together a slashing wound on his right cheek. She’d seen him look rough on camera at Reaping Day, and it wasn’t that bad, but he looked exhausted. “Tough time in Milltown?” She’d heard the reports of dead and wounded, but it was Haymitch’s appearance, and probably Johanna’s as well if she looked closer, that told the tale.

“Yeah.” From his tone, obviously it wasn’t an invited topic of discussion. “How are the new arrivals?”

“Settling in as well as can be expected. The adjustment’s actually easier for them than us, I think.” He gave her a look of confusion in answer, grey eyes narrowed and brows knitted. “They’ve just had months of being controlled and told exactly what they can and can’t do. At least here they’re not stuck in a cell all the time and beaten.”

“Ah. Niel?”

“We’re doing OK.”

He nodded, almost more to himself than her. “Finnick?” he asked, making the word sound almost wary in its delicate care and how he didn’t quite look at her.

“Haven’t seen as much of him,” she had to confess. “He’s been in the infirmary—“ More mute incomprehension in his expression, and she explained, “They took off his left arm at the elbow, Haymitch.” 

She didn’t need to explain that more. He’d seen what had happened to Peeta’s wound as it festered. “Fucking mutt bites,” he cursed softly, sighing and looking over towards Johanna, on the floor now on her hands and knees, playing some sort of game with Lindy and Lacey without any apparent self-consciousness as the little girls. “We’ll go see him next, then.”

It was subtle, but then, Haymitch was rarely obvious in anything in all the years she’d known him, and she’d been trained by the Academy for years in the nuances of gestures, expressions, looks. His eyes lingered just a little too long on Johanna, as if he didn’t want to look away. 

He’d looked at her like that once, so long ago, though then he’d been young enough, untrained enough, for there to be that same wary hope she’d seen in Trina’s eyes. Hope that the world wasn’t full of darkness and terrors, hope that Chantilly would be someone who’d make it safe again. Back in the 51st, that seventeen-year-old boy with nothing and nobody, who’d endured the Games and endured his family’s murder and becoming a Capitol plaything, she’d seen the last flickers of a child’s soul remaining in those eyes. There had been the part of her that wanted to reach out to him, but she’d stifled it. He hadn’t wanted her, because the girl he loved was dead and buried. And she hadn’t wanted him like that, only wanted to make his suffering stop, touched by how alone he was. 

She had people in Victors’ Square to rely upon, Niello to help her in Mentor Central. He had nothing and nobody to teach him, to warn him what he was walking into that year, to help prepare him the hard road still ahead. Maybe she was from One and he was from Twelve, but they’d started the same, born to the mines and the suffering and hopelessness. That part of him tugged at the part of her never quite forgotten. But not even for her to entirely forget herself. 

He’d smiled at her hesitantly after that first time they slept together, a shy boy’s smile, and she’d seen a light come back into his eyes. Niello’s warnings about getting too close to other victors were fresh in her mind, with his seeing that she’d taken a shine to the new Twelve boy. _Be his friend all you want, but you know the boundaries, Tilly._

 _He’s no threat, Niel._ His tributes would never be serious contenders. He’d put all his hopes on that poor Twelve girl that Ruby had taken apart with cool precision to appeal to the sponsors, and Haymitch went berserk about it, not understanding how the Games worked, not understanding how One worked, an ignorant coal-mining boy thrown in the deep end.

But he’d known how to listen, and learn, and unlike many, how to see past district loyalties and his own prejudices. No wonder Snow had shoved him down so hard: smart, cunning, able to reach out, with the gift of seeing the truth in people and able to adapt easily, and he always cared more than he liked to admit.

So she’d helped him as best she could, better than some desperate shadow-play of romance. She could have seduced him with that fiction, easily, as vulnerable as he’d been that year. But he’d been hurt enough, and he’d be hurt more in years to come. No threat to her. It would have been like kicking a puppy. So she befriended him, and slept with him while the comfort of it still did them both some good in those early years, and warned him, _Don’t go and do something stupid like fall in love with me. That’s playing into their hands._

He hadn’t fallen for Chantilly, and whatever feelings of mingled affection and pity and kindness she’d had for him paled next to what she’d eventually discovered with Niel. She’d wanted to protect Haymitch from further harm, but that wasn’t the same—he was more like the little brother she’d never had. And even as he grew cooler and darker and cynical, feelings locked down like a frozen mountain lake, he’d never locked it all away to the point he didn’t try to drink it away. But apparently in these new times where anything seemed possible, even Haymitch might have become a bit of a phoenix from the ashes.

“So does she love you back?” she asked him quietly. 

To his credit, he didn’t startle or stammer or instinctively deny that he loved Johanna. They’d long ago moved past pretense, no need to mince words. Looking away from Johanna, but not looking at Chantilly either, he answered, almost too soft to hear, “No.”

Given how fucking clueless Haymitch was about the depth of affection most of the other victors had for him, she took that answer with a grain of salt. By this point his self-hatred ran so deep she wouldn’t put great odds on him recognizing a woman in love with him if she smacked him over the head with it. But she’d let it bide for now, and observe for herself. Now she gave him the delicate, deeply probing question. “And do you want her to?” 

“Are we having a feelings discussion here, Tilly? I get those regular as clockwork with the shrink already,” he said, voice turning caustic.

So she’d struck a nerve. That said plenty. “Oh, wonderful, Mitchie.” She used the nickname she always used when she wanted to tweak his nose a bit. “You can feel all warm and fuzzy that you love her, and it doesn’t demand a damn thing of you in return. The whole ‘hoping for a beautiful unrequited love’ bit only looks good on teenagers.” She wouldn’t mention Peeta’s name, sensing that his protectiveness of the boy and his loss might make Haymitch’s temper explode. “Not so much when you’re forty. So what do you do if she loves you and you actually have to get off your ass and do more than congratulate yourself on being so selfless and noble?”

True, there was that part of him locked up ever since sixteen, the romantic part of his soul, and apparently it was still stuck back at that age. He’d kissed his little girlfriend back then, fooled around with her a bit even, but he’d never been tested in the long haul as an adult love would. He scowled at her, and with his downward-drawn brows and the thick, dark growth of beard, it made him look like an irritated bear. “If you were anyone else, I swear,” he said lowly, hayseed Twelve accent thickening with temper, making it sound half like a threat. 

“I lived through it with Niel,” staring at him, refusing to back down. If he wanted a friend, she’d be his friend and be honest. She’d lived through those clumsy, horrible months with Niello, realizing heading into the 63rd that she’d begun to love him. Loving him and in her heart of hearts, probably hoping he’d never truly love her back and in doing so challenge her, demand more of her than she could bear to give, ask her to truly open up and let him in. Loving Niel from a distance had been the safe, pretty dream of a child who’d never been allowed to love. She probably understood Peeta Mellark on that score even better than Haymitch did. But she’d been terrified to love him up close, close enough to touch, close enough for him to see all her failings and her flaws. From the far side of it, the risk of being hurt was more than worth what she’d gotten from Niel by opening up, but she couldn’t guarantee that for him. Finding out when she finally spoke up that Niel had been pining too for those months only made her feel all the more foolish.

“I know that. I spent how many nights during Gloss’ Games buying you shots and letting you tell me about it, right? That’s why I said you’re the only one that can get away with saying it.” 

“So take the advice then, hayseed.” He grunted at that. She smirked a little at it—men. “For what it’s worth, she’s one of the few women that I think can keep up with you.” And occasionally verbally kick him in the ass a bit when he was getting too self-indulgent with the moping, and at least Johanna had the credentials that he would accept her right to do so. “Now quit pestering me and everyone else about intel and go play with your kids already. They need you now. The war will wait for morning, you know.” He gave her another of those slight smiles of his, nodding in thanks, and headed over towards Lindy, Lacey, and Johanna. That, more than anything, would probably help him shed some of the weight of whatever happened in Milltown, and she’d seen other, gentler parts of him seem to wake around those kids, children he wouldn’t have to escort to their deaths in the arena. Looking over at Niel reading to Donny and Trina, all three of them with a look of contentment on their faces, she breathed a sigh of relief. Yes, they’d be OK.

~~~~~~~~~~

Rumpled as they still were, Johanna insisted on going to see Finnick after dinner. The kids came first, as they ought, but there still had to be space for friends, particularly an injured one. Hearing that he’d lost the arm hadn’t surprised her entirely. Admittedly, she hadn’t thought about it in detail enough to really make a clear picture, but she’d seen that nasty injury on his arm back in the arena, and if Thirteen, with all the reason in the world to try to save Peeta’s leg, couldn’t do it, she should have figured they’d just hack off the limb of a Capitol prisoner like Finnick.

Aside from the pink, puckered flesh of his stump just above his elbow, though, Finnick looked better than she expected. She’d imagined him starved, covered in scars and bruises and cuts. He looked tired and a bit thin, and she swore there were a few grey threads in that bronze hair already. But all things considered, he looked much better than her nightmares. No polite way to say that, though, and ask about it without sounding like a complete bitch trivializing whatever he’d been through.

Finnick led things off, though. Annie was right there by his side, of course, and two beds down she saw Gloss, nursing what looked like a badly wounded leg with Cashmere hovering over him like a watchful golden eagle. “They say they’ll get me a prosthetic of some kind,” Finnick said cheerfully, holding his arms open, and she went to him, hugging him tightly for a moment. It felt odd to feel only one arm around her, but she’d get used to it. This was her friend and he was alive—that was what mattered. “Not sure whether I’ll use it or not. Chaff’s kind of spoiled us all.”

“Chaff didn’t wear it because he wanted to put off the buyers,” Haymitch told him dryly, stepping forward and giving Finnick a firm slap on the back in greeting.

“He might have been on to something with that,” Finnick answered, giving that fake smile for the cameras that always reminded her of the Capitol oleo they took out in the woods to grease pans and skillets while lacking refrigeration for butter: artificially bright, insubstantial, and oily. The Capitol audiences lapped it up, but she saw it and her heart hurt—apparently he was struggling to keep it together that he’d resort to the glib veneer. “Well, no more buyers for me now.” He waved the stump mockingly.

“No more buyers for anyone, ever, I’d hope,” Haymitch said with a quiet, angry edge.

Now Finnick’s expression turned more genuine. “Of course. And you know I stand with you. However I can…” A pained, embarrassed look crossed his face then. “However I can help,” he finished lamely, looking away.

“Finn…” Haymitch said, his guilt painful to hear.

“I agreed to be in the alliance, Haymitch,” Finnick told him, utterly calm. “I knew what it might cost me. I’m not a kid you coerced or lied to about it.” Haymitch winced visibly at that, and Johanna’s temper rose—was Finnick deliberately prodding at the still-lingering wound of Katniss? No, ready verbal attacks on soft spots like that had been more her style. Chances were Finnick realized, like Johanna had, that some part of Haymitch hadn’t quite given up on seeing him as a child. And unlike her, he hadn’t been able to challenge him on it and demand to be seen as an adult. “It’s the Capitol’s doing. You don’t put that on you.”

“We’re going to Four next, I think,” Johanna told him, eager to get off that topic before Haymitch could step further into it. They were grinding away at Four slow and steady. It seemed timely that here was Finnick and they would take back Four next, and she wanted to do whatever the hell she could to chase that lost, shamed expression off his face. It reminded her too much of Finn at sixteen, that first year when they both were being sold off. It would be too easy for him to fall down into the pit of depression, and she’d already seen Haymitch dive deep in to the point he was still crawling out only slowly, she couldn’t bear to lose Finnick to it as well. “You should go there too.”

“I really can’t fight like this,” Finnick told her gently.

“It’s your home, and you deserve to be there,” she told him. She’d push Coin if she had to on this one. After what he’d endured, she figured her friend damn well deserved to not be sidelined if he wanted to fight. “Might not be able to get you in on the whole thing, we’ll probably be out the door pretty soon here. But when we get to Victors’ Bayou, you should be there.”

“Oh, I’m sure we can twist Plutarch’s arm by dangling a propo opportunity,” Haymitch answered her. “It’ll mean a few nice pretty lines for the camera from you, Finn, but…”

“Done more than my share of that,” Finnick said with a shrug, “and for much less cause. Sounds like you two have had all the fun with it while I’ve been gone.”

“Oh, please, we really need someone who can play nice and doesn’t automatically want to threaten the camera crew or insult them,” she told him. “And you know he and I,” she jerked a thumb towards Haymitch and then herself, “aren’t it.” 

He grinned at that, some of the real Finnick coming back into his expression. “Well…I could learn to use a pistol, maybe,” he went on, sounding doubtful. “You can use those with only one hand, right?” It felt odd to realize she’d moved past Finnick there, having used firearms for months now to the point here it felt almost natural. But aside from Peacekeepers, nobody in the districts touched guns. 

“Damn straight,” she reassured him.

“Ah, c’mon, that fucking trident was always for show anyway,” Haymitch pointed out with a wry grin. “More pretty than practical, you always said.”

Finnick laughed at that, loud and deep, and something eased in her to hear it. “Y’all hold up a second, you didn’t hear I was slinging a trident on fishing boats from the time I was a little boy?” Now all of them laughed, Annie included, mocking the ridiculousness of the Capitol’s stupid tales about its victors. Finnick nodded, something flickering intensely in his green eyes for a moment. “Teach me to use that pistol, and maybe get me a good knife. I can use that one-handed too.”

Haymitch smiled at that, reaching out and clasping Finnick’s shoulder with his hand. “Consider it done. Rest up, and they’ll get you training soon enough. Call it your therapy, maybe.”

She left the infirmary with her heart lighter, relieved. Finnick would be all right. They’d wounded him, but not broken him, and there had been no judgment, no resentment.

Peeta and Vick had showered, and she and Haymitch had helped Lindy and Posy, and even now she could hear the sounds of them out in the common bedroom getting ready for bed as she headed back into the bathroom. Posy’s voice asking something, Lindy wanting a story, the rusty groan of the bedsprings as Peeta’s weight hit the steel coils built hard as a rock and probably never oiled.

She slipped into the bathroom again, already unbuttoning her shirt, just as Haymitch tugged on the faded grey t-shirt of his pajamas. They had that agreement to not stare that carried over from CPC nights to these other nights, though it would have been ridiculously impractical to try to avoid seeing any skin at all. She’d walked in on him shirtless and not really looked beyond a fleeting glimpse of that broad chest dusted with dark hair, or the line of his back and she’d noted scars there. But this time the motion of his hands caught her eye instinctively, and she ended up looking at him and seeing those scars clearly, four thin lines there stretching from his shoulders partway down his spine, parallel slashes that had turned white with age. Maybe it was Finnick’s missing arm too turning her thoughts towards Capitol-inflicted pain, but she ended up gawking.

He pulled the t-shirt down, covering up, though he didn’t seem in an awkward hurry for it. “Not quite like I was in my glory days, I know,” he said with that dry snark that told her he was covering up something more than his skin.

The thirty-three-year-old she’d barely looked at those years ago had neither hair nor scars, but she was no Capitol twit, disgusted by a body that hadn’t been altered and plucked. She’d seen shirtless, sweaty men in the woods all summer long every year, and some of them were as damn hairy as bears. It was the scars that caught her aback, because she really had no idea what the hell he’d gotten into to earn those, and she hadn’t asked before. But seeing the stillness in him, waiting to see what she’d do or say, obviously capable to say something that he’d brought it up, she decided joking about it would be the best option. “What, did you try to wrestle a forest cat for fun and lose?” she quipped.

“Sounds more like your idea of stupidity,” he returned with a smirk, and she let out her breath at that, feeling the tension drain away. “Nah. After Jubilation finally gave up on me back in 69 and my regulars were all gone, Snow decided to get what last bits he could out of me that summer.” He shrugged, reaching for the bar of shaving soap, lathering it up between his palms. “A few out there that’d still pay for one last hurrah with a victor they now didn’t have to worry about holding back as much they did when I was new. Not like Snow was gonna invest in Remake at that point.” She stayed silent, wise enough now to realize that if she interrupted, even to support him in her rage, he might not go on. “Mostly bruises and the like, but that,” his right hand crept over his shoulder, touching briefly between the shoulder blades, “was my last night with a patron. Thalius. And you know what gets Thalius off.”

Yeah, she did. Humiliation, fear, and pain—her nights with Thalius Eland still lived in her nightmares. She’d gone to Haymitch after the first of them, hair raggedly cut by her own hand after Thalius had grabbed it to help force himself deeper down her throat, hurting there, hurting between her legs, hurting everywhere. The alcohol Haymitch gave her burned in her sore throat, but she’d felt like it killed some of the feeling of filth there anyway. “Of course, couldn’t play the scared kid anymore to get his rocks off. But scaring an arrogant prick like they had me play, humbling that, appealed to him. I figured that out quick enough when he had me tied up and gave me those cuts, said he’d keep on cutting. Said that Twelve’s tributes wouldn’t be any worse off without me, that obviously I couldn’t save anyone, so Snow had sanctioned anything--everything.”

She sat down on the toilet a bit heavily, not wanting to imagine it, but all too able to picture the unholy light in those pale blue eyes beneath the perfect ash-blond hair—mostly dye now—hearing the words in that disgustingly silken voice. Telling Haymitch just how little his life was worth, sold without limits as a plaything for a sadist. “And?” She prompted him softly.

“And I think I finally realized right then I didn’t give much of a shit if I survived that night or any other,” he replied, voice flat as he reached for the razor and calmly took the first stroke across his right cheek, a clean-shaven path appearing in the midst of the white lather. “But really, my life wasn’t in that much danger. I doubt he paid Snow enough for anything like death rights, and me going to the slaughter quietly wasn’t what Thalius wanted anyway. I realized that. So I begged and I pleaded and I sniveled and I obeyed, just like he wanted. Made him a very happy man all night long. And then I went and got Chaff to slap some bandages on the back, confirmed with Victor Affairs that I was done for good, and I got falling-down drunk for the rest of the Games.” 

She suspected it was figuring out his own indifference to living, that cruel remark about being useless to save anyone, and Snow’s final “fuck you” in shoving him down so brutally one last time before casting him off as useless that drove him to that massive bender. He’d slowly slid downhill for years, but that summer he seemed to have finally given up even the pretense of trying and accepted sinking down into the cesspool—after that he’d been constantly drunk, disheveled, dirty, didn’t give a damn. Lousy summer for her too, given Finnick telling her about Annie and Johanna going on a dedicated campaign to hurt him and really only hurting herself and everyone else. But at least that had been by her choice, rather than Haymitch who’d played by the rules all that time and still ended up fucked over. “That last slew of buyers—usual practice for Snow?” Was that what Finnick and others could have expected eventually, even her if she hadn’t made herself unmarketable so early?

“No, but then I’ve always been Snow’s mad dog that he never could quite trust,” he answered, hands still surprisingly steady as he scraped delicately at his upper lip. “Best get your shower on,” he gestured to the stall with his razor, “Lights Out soon enough.”

Stripping off quickly, she did the usual perfunctory scrub of her body, washing her hair. The heady stir of feelings in her felt like it was too much to withstand, and the steamy heat inside the shower stall didn’t help. Anger, of course—she still often felt anger first. But the odd feeling of wanting to give the poor bastard a hug was there too, some need in her to reach out and console, and an equally hot desire to keep him from being hurt again, and talking about it years later in that matter-of-fact tone that spoke to how much pain he’d taken on that each new thing became just blur and noise eventually. Not that she worried a freak with a razor would threaten to peel his skin off again. Physical pain was the easier part most times anyway—it was the depression and sense of worthlessness that he carried from Thalius Eland that night that scarred far harder than any blade.

She’d seen him tired and stressed and at the end of his limits at Milltown, staring at the endless mass of injured and dying people in the field hospital. He hadn’t reached for a bottle, which was a damn marvel considering all the hootch they’d used there to keep things sterile. When had it shifted and she now genuinely worried about Haymitch, in more than an abstract, self-centered fear that he’d kill himself someday when his liver shit itself out, or he fell down the stairs and broke his neck, and then she’d truly be alone even at the Games with nobody who could understand? 

True, Finnick would try to be her friend always, but she’d always come third at best behind Annie and Mags, besides, he’d made it through the worst with his sanity and his goodness intact, like a golden sun that only made her look even darker and shadow-cast. _Yeah, well, look at Finnick now too,_ as she brushed her teeth, tasting the bland, gritty toothpaste. _Missing an arm and probably tortured by those fuckers and he’s still got his shit together._

Confusion quickly gave way to the swell of guilt. Pure luck—Finnick could have been the one that hovercraft picked up instead of her. He could have been here with Annie all these months, deserved it more than she had. His being alive now was no thanks to her, and she hadn’t even been the one to help rescue him. Some friend she made there—she might have done much better by Haymitch since the Quell, but the bitter, caustic sense of failure when it came to Finnick rankled. She spat out the toothpaste, rinsed her mouth and wiped it with the back of her hand, turning out the light as she left the bathroom.

Lindy had already fallen asleep even with the lights on, huddled up in a tight little ball with the covers clutched around her. Vick sprawled out in his bed, thin limbs all akimbo like tree branches, and her heart ached as she had the sense that like her with Heike, he tried to make himself bigger and fill the empty space where Rory had once slept. Posy had curled up in Peeta’s bed beside him and he spoke lowly to her, some story about a magical deer by the sound of it. The kids were all right tonight, so she could rest easier on that score. She slipped quietly into bed beside Haymitch then, punching the thin pillow maybe a little more aggressively than bunching it up warranted. The lights clicked out just then, plunging them all into darkness.

She heard the soft shift of him settling, not coming so close as to touch, but leaning in closer to keep his voice down low enough to not be overheard by Peeta. “Finnick?” he asked gruffly.

“Yeah,” she muttered in return, somehow not surprised that his mind had turned there as well. “Fate’s a bitch. One little thing goes one way or another…it could have been him that got rescued, him that they put on camera to kick this whole thing off.”

A soft, slow sigh answered that. “Here’s some advice. If you’re gonna beat yourself bloody over Finnick, Johanna, at least do it for things that are true.”

She scoffed, her suddenly blood up, and the urge to lash out with the harsh edge of temper was right there as ever. “Don’t be a hypocrite—this from the guy who turned kicking his ass over everything he can’t help into his life’s calling?” She kept her voice low only with effort, wishing like hell that they could just go somewhere and talk privately, like free adults with a damn choice about their lives. Seemed like every time she left Thirteen for the battlefield or the like, every time she came back the draconian ways rubbed her raw all over again.

“And I’m trying to do better with that,” he returned in an angry near-whisper. “Truth? Yeah, Finnick likely caught it worse because he’s your friend, and mine. I’m gonna feel as bad about that as you, believe me, and we owe him for it. But don’t drown yourself in thinking that he could have taken your place. Self-pity ain’t you, and he couldn’t. He’s a good man, one of the best I’ve known, and he’s sharp with his wits and his weapons. And the Capitol’s misused him plenty and he’s stayed strong. We need good people like him to help keep us all from turning to the worst in us. But he could never lead this. He grew up safe from grubbing down in the dirt with most of us. Got enough to eat, good medical care. Even at fourteen, he was bigger and stronger than most seventeen-year-old boys from Twelve. His Games were easier and shorter than most, because it was a foregone conclusion. He got the priciest sponsorship gift _ever_ while every other kid in that arena starved and suffered and died because of it. You think a farmer from Nine, a lumberjack from Seven, was ever going to be able to look at someone the Capitol’s favored from birth, who’s never understood how hard they live and die, and easily rally behind him?”

“But…” She felt compelled to argue, though she wasn’t sure what exactly.

“It ain’t about charm and good looks, or even how the Capitol whored him out. They needed someone genuine, passionate. Someone who came from the bottom, Johanna, someone who grew up as poor as them breathing in that same hopelessness, someone who struggled and suffered all the way through life and the arena and survived it despite being told they shouldn’t, because to the Capitol, their life was disposable. More than Finnick, maybe even a bit more than Katniss, you can do that. Because you’ve never been a favored daughter—the Capitol’s never lifted a damn finger to make you into an exception, or to give you anything except pain.”

She laughed then, muted to a hoarse chuckle, feeling weirdly caught between hysterical laughter and tears. So people could rally to her now because the Capitol hadn’t loved her and smoothed her path. “That’s some fucked up justification. But guess it’s true.” Still, it unsettled her. The sense of power felt too heavy when he put it like that; reminding her of people who looked at her like she was something more than human. She hadn’t asked for this shit, it was Haymitch and Plutarch who’d come begging her to fill the gap Katniss left. Poor kid must have hated it every bit as much, felt like a trapped animal sometimes. Tapping into their frustration and rage and suffering—that was who she had been. In the earliest days, she could have so easily fanned that into a wildfire that could have consumed the country, and the woman she’d been wouldn’t have given a damn either what it cost or who it hurt, so long as it consumed the Capitol. But especially for the kids, she wanted to leave a world of more than ashes. It was no easy path to walk sometimes. “So when I tell them this is about us all coming to the table free and equal, for our kids’ future, and not about vengeance…”

“Yeah. From someone who has every possible reason to call for blood, it actually means something for them to see you to choose a better way.” He clapped his hands softly, once, twice, and she could imagine him smirking in the darkness. “Nicely done. And you’re in this now well and good, so stop feeling like you’re a damn second-tier poser.”

“Oh, shut up,” she grumbled, “you’re starting to sound like Plutarch with all that banner-waving ‘woman of the people’ crap.”

“Nah, Plutarch would have used a lot more philosophical bullshit.” Hearing his soft chuckle, she smiled in spite of herself. Haymitch and his glib quips and blunt good sense could get through her dark mood unlike any cloying sweetness ever could. “We’ll do what we can for Finnick. Be there for him. But don’t let the Capitol use guilt over him to tear you down.”

“Pot, kettle,” she reminded him, well aware of how good he was at beating himself down and rushing to seize any shred of guilty responsibility. He’d shown it right there in front of Finnick earlier that evening. Easy for him to try to talk her up, but she wasn’t going to let him take it on himself either. “Like he said, he chose to be in the alliance. He’s not a boy anymore. He’s a grown man, with a girlfriend he’d probably have married years ago. And Plutarch was the one who demanded the hovercraft leave that night. Not you. And even if you had suggested it, it was because you were trying to keep all the rest of us alive. Hard choices, right?” But she would always think better of him for how fiercely he’d argued—for caring, for hurting over the idea of leaving people behind. He’d never be able to live in Coin’s rational world where human frailties and losses and pain were rendered invisible beside the idol of the greater good, where people didn’t matter. It was Snow’s world too, really, where the only thing that mattered was avoiding chaos and upheaval at any cost. She could have been like them so easily with as little as she’d thought of most people, ready to throw anyone into the flames if only to help feed a fire that could make the Capitol burn. The thought made her shudder now. Not a world worth creating, not a person worth being. Fighting back with all her will didn’t mean letting them turn her into a monster, and she could have so easily become one. 

“Point taken,” he answered softly. “Get some sleep. We’ll go see about the Four strategy, and getting Finn into some firearms training, in the morning.”

She settled her head down against the pillow, drawing her knees up towards her chest, hoped she wouldn’t dream of the battle out in Milltown tonight, safe as she was back with the kids. Suddenly she felt the light pressure of his fingertips brushing her wrist, just below her thumb, as if he assumed she was drowsy and trying to get her attention. “What?”

He drew his hand back quickly, as if burned. “Nah, nothing.” She heard him roll over.

Now she kicked her own ass mentally, realizing how slow she was on the uptake. Blame so many years where any kind of touch was all about pain or power, but she’d misunderstood. He wasn’t trying to get her attention. He wasn’t trying to fuck her either. She was sure of that, had gotten to the point where she didn’t suspiciously assume any touch that wasn’t about emotional desperation was about sex. Had he been reaching for her hand, only for a moment? The ideal took on more appeal. Nothing with ulterior motive, simply a kind human touch.

She was confused now herself. Faced with the prospect of his turned back and the weirdness of chasing him in his retreat, pressing herself against his back to be able to reach his hand now and not sure whether it was welcome and whether she wanted to get into all that, she couldn’t find words that would mend it either. _You can touch me, you know._ That sounded tawdry, or stupid, or both. And saying he could hold her hand if he wanted made her sound like some stupid little eleven-year-old hoping a boy would walk her home from school, like she’d be drawing _Johanna Abernathy_ in her fucking school notebook the next day surrounded by hearts.

Yeah, well, she was Johanna Abernathy in name at least, fat lot of good it did her right there. “Dammit,” she muttered softly, rolling over herself onto her other side so she wouldn’t be sleeping facing his pointedly turned back. Giving the pillow another fluff-whack for good measure, angry and frustrated in ways she couldn’t even fully name, she closed her eyes and went to sleep.


	33. Chapter 33

It took Haymitch arguing fiercely with the doctors about it, and Peeta had the sense that if Haymitch hadn’t trained with them as a medic they would have dismissed him as a totally ignorant blowhard. Johanna adding her own vehement efforts finally tipped the balance, and Peeta noticed with some amusement that she wasn’t above playing the “I’m the Phoenix” card when needed—though he had the feeling she played it shrewdly and rarely that it hadn’t run its course yet here in ultra-equal Thirteen. It surprised him that she’d burn some of that latitude on him. 

But he wouldn’t protest it. Finally, _finally_ , they’d cleared Peeta for a surface interval, although still grousing about the uneven terrain and the risks. Bundling up in a new winter coat, the synthetic fiber scratchy on the back of his neck, he paused as Haymitch asked, “You mind if Madge comes along as well?”

Madge—she’d moved in with them and become the latest adoptee for Haymitch and Johanna. Unlike Vick, Posy, and Lindy, he couldn’t start to think of Madge as a sibling, given that he’d known her too long growing up, been invited to her birthday every year because his father—and in later years, Peeta assisting—had made the cake. It was easier having the younger kids around, kids who looked up to him, who hadn’t known him before. “Nope, that’s fine,” he replied, buttoning the coat carefully. 

With that agreement, the four of them trundled up to the surface, with Haymitch and Johanna carrying their rifles to go hunting. He tried to not think of Katniss at that association, and failed miserably, but he’d gotten so used to the pain of it flooding through him that it barely registered as another blip. Everything could summon it: hunting, long dark hair, a particular smile, Johanna’s role as the Phoenix, to replace the dead Mockingjay. He didn’t instinctively think any longer, _Katniss would like this_ or _I wonder what she’d say_ , like he had in the early months. The permanence of Katniss’ death had sunk in a while ago, when he was lucid enough to deal with it rather than doped up on morphling. Now there was just the lingering hurt of absence, like the phantom pain he’d experienced both times now where they’d lopped off a leg.

It wasn’t easy, as they stepped from the hatch and walked up a gentle rise towards the forest. Johanna’s light steps and Haymitch’s ease made him feel like an idiot. At least with one natural leg he’d still had that bit of sensation and balance, the ability to feel rough ground underfoot. Though as he’d found in the arena the second time, even half the ability was still a liability, and he’d felt—or thought he felt—the predatory eyes of their allies on him as he inevitably stumbled on the rough terrain and roots and vines. Only so much he could do to train for that running around the Meadow, and to his mind, there were Johanna, Beetee, Blight, Wiress, Finnick, all looking for the weakness to lunge and strike eventually when their alliance broke up.

Now with two fake feet, he’d lost even that clumsy ability, and the smallest pebble could send him stumbling if he didn’t watch for it. He could have laughed, or cried, remembering running around the track at school with ease even if he wasn’t fast at it, and how solid and sure his footing had been at wrestling. “Can we sit?” Madge asked tiredly. “There’s a good spot here.” She gestured over to their right, towards the broken, tumbledown pieces of stone that had once been Thirteen’s Justice Building.

Haymitch turned again to them and there was no surprise on his face. He must have already noticed Peeta laboring, though in his usual style, he hadn’t condescended to make a big deal about it. Watching as they found some shattered remnants of granite columns to perch on, he nodded, slinging the rifle back over his shoulder and jerking his chin towards Johanna, waiting for him further down the path. “Either of you needs anything, holler—otherwise we’ll be back soon-like,” he said, eyes lingering on Peeta and Madge for a few long moments with that level, assessing gaze he had, though his expression showed nothing of whatever he thought. 

Peeta closed his eyes then, turned up his face, the mingled sensations of sunlight and crisp air almost a caress on his skin. Four full months he’d lost down in the warrens of Thirteen until the doctors now finally cleared him and both his prostheses for something besides plodding back and forth on steel floors. Four months without seeing the sun, without smelling fresh air. Now he had the notion he must understand the barest sliver of how the Seam folk felt going down the mines each day, a part of Katniss he could never have hoped to know before, and hadn’t really wanted to know in favor of the fantasy he’d stamped on her in his mind—too little, too late now.

His eyes burned beneath his closed lids at that, and he inhaled deeply, the cold air stinging his lungs, and the fit of coughing hopefully would provide an excuse for any tears in his eyes. Madge handed him a handkerchief, neat and efficient as he ever remembered her being. “It’s so good to see the sun again,” she said softly, tucking her legs up tight against her chest and wrapping her arms around them, tipping her head back as he had.

Looking at her, really looking, he saw that same pallor on her skin that he saw when he looked at himself, so fish-belly white it was near translucent, the bluish cast of veins visible in some spots. She hadn’t seen the sun in months either, because while he’d been on a hovercraft to Thirteen, she’d watched her parents and her boyfriend executed in front of her eyes, been forced to kill other kids to survive, and then been a Capitol prisoner probably in fear for her life every day since. Something crumbled within him just a little at that, some crack in the mirrored walls around him that could seem to show nothing but his pain and grief, reflected over and over. “Yeah,” he agreed, the word coming out rough.

She didn’t respond to that at first. Then she cocked her head aside, like a curious bird glancing at something. “The littles look up to you. I can see that.”

He managed a watery chuckle. “Funny, given I was the youngest.” But somehow, having them to look after helped settle him—somebody who actually did need him. The way Posy or Lindy looked at him, so openly hopeful and caring, their hugs and love offered without guile or reluctance or as part of a Capitol-spun lie, soothed something in him that had ached all his life. Even Vick’s more careful affection helped.

Madge smoothed her hands nervously over her bent knees, pressing her feet more tightly together. “Do you…want me to tell you about it?” 

_It._ The executions, he assumed. She’d watched his parents and Farl get their brains blown out, and then seen Bannick die in that sick “replacement” Quell. “You want to talk about it?” he returned.

“Not really,” she said softly. “The psychiatrist is working with me on it, but…”

He nodded at that. “It’s always easier with someone who’s been through it.”

“Katniss.” She glanced away. “I know—“

He cut her off, not wanting to wander down that path. “Haymitch too. Johanna. Blight and Chaff and Chantilly and all the rest. You’re—you’re one of us now.”

“Not a club I really was eager to join.”

“Not one any of us wanted to join.”

Madge’s smile was crooked, dark, an expression far too old for a seventeen-year-old’s face. “We all wanted it enough to kill for it, though. Even you, really. You were willing to lie and cheat and kill—does it make it any more right that you sacrificed those other people’s lives for her, and not for you?”

He couldn’t argue with that. Two years in a row now he’d done it, and people ended up dead because of it. The Careers last year hadn’t been saints, but they’d been kids too, trying to survive, and he’d ruthlessly planned their deaths. 

Sometimes when Katniss looked at him, and hearing both Haymitch and Katniss talk about him like he was something far too good for this world, he’d wanted to grab them both by the throat and shake them, scream at them. They were the ones who were supposed to see him honestly, and in their way, they’d been almost as deluded as the Capitol seeing him as the ultimate romantic. “I don’t know,” he told her tiredly. And had she been anyone who hadn’t been through it herself—but she had. It was a question she probably grappled with herself even now. But in his heart he knew. They hadn’t been his lives to bargain away. At least this year he’d been honest enough to get his own hands dirty rather than pretending some kind of moral superiority. 

“I’m not faulting you for it, Peet. That’s the Games.”

“That’s the Games,” he agreed with her, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Maybe if they send me in again I can lose an arm this time,” he quipped. Sounding like Haymitch now—just hand him a bottle of white liquor to complete the picture. Maybe it was a good thing they controlled alcohol so tightly here in Thirteen, because now he truly understood his mentor’s need to drown his guilt and his sorrow with painful clarity. The girl he loved, his family, all dead, and only he was left to carry on with the crushing burden of it all.

“Peeta…”

“Hey, I’ve got two good limbs left and nobody to try to die for this time, right?” The bitterness in his voice surprised him, some untapped well that he hadn’t even imagined until now. He could still see Katniss’ wide-staring eyes, and everything within him screaming that it couldn’t end like that, that he’d made the bargain again and it wasn’t ever supposed to be her. Maybe some part of him expected that his willingness to die, and his having lost one leg already, meant that fate wouldn’t screw him over, that the bargain had been accepted. He’d never imagined it like this, that his sacrifice wouldn’t be judged worth it, but why should it? He’d spent his entire life being told how terrible he was. He couldn’t even fight now. She’d saved his ass last year while he fumbled his way around the arena and then slowly started dying from infection, and he hadn’t returned the favor this year; a useless fool.

“Does it have to be a damn competition?” she burst out in reply, blue eyes narrowed and lips flaring back in a momentary snarl. He’d never heard her swear before, never seen cool, self-possessed Margedda Undersee burst out like that, out of control. “Does it have to be this stupid math of adding up what you’ve lost and what I’ve lost, and seeing who ‘wins’ the right to be upset and angry and drown themselves in it? It was always like that with Gale, this—this _club_ that he’d try to use on me, like I couldn’t understand anything just because my dad was the mayor rather than a dead coal miner, like life had been so perfect to me. Gale loved me, but he resented me too because some part of him didn’t want to love me. Didn’t even want to hear what it was like having a father who cautioned me that I could never misbehave because the Capitol was watching him and understanding that part of why I was born was because the Capitol _expected_ him to have a child so he wouldn’t be immune from the fear of a child of his at the Reaping, and then a mother who married him because it was convenient, and who openly wished she was dead—do you know what it’s like knowing that your father can’t quite love you and your mother is so wrapped up in her own pain she can’t even see you?”

“Yes.” Her rage and pain was like a spear that lanced through him, calling his attention out to her. How could he not understand Madge, when his pa had never cared enough to fight for him, and his ma constantly screamed his own worthlessness at him? Screamed it at poor Farl the most, of course, the baby that had prompted Liam and Jinny Mellark’s hasty wedding, but Bannick and Peeta hadn’t been immune from it either.

Now she looked at him with a calmer, steadier gaze. “You do,” she agreed, voice quieter now. “But we’ve all lost things, we’ve all been hurt. And I’m tired of it being a contest.”

“That’s the Games,” he told her wearily, echoing his own words. Staring up into the cloudless blue sky again rather than looking at her, eyes drinking in the sight of something so open and free and clean-seeming. No matter what pain took place down in the dirt, the sky was something else different entirely, and after the pink sky of the arena was the last he’d seen, the sheer reality felt comforting. His fingers suddenly itched to paint it. “All a big contest. Who’s prettier, who’s more charming, who’s trained and willing to kill, who’s strong and well-fed, who’s from the districts the Capitol likes the most. Whose life is worth the most, in the end? And the ones that lose that contest—they’re all forgotten. Dead and discarded like trash. I bet you hardly anyone out there remembers the names of most of the dead tributes from last year, let alone years and years ago.”

“Mister Abernathy—Haymitch,” she corrected herself hurriedly, and he could hear the flustered edge in his voice, “I think he does.” He waited, sensing she had something more to say. “He called me by my aunt’s name once. When I caught him stumbling back from the Hob drunk after he got back from the Games and…I tried to help him home.” She fell silent.

He could see it suddenly in his mind’s eye, and he might have asked about her sympathy for Haymitch given that almost every kid regarded him as a pathetic worthless drunk at best, and something like the local bogeyman at worst. Peeta had been terrified of the man when he was still among the littles. His ma had enjoyed threatening her boys with that specter. _Oh, and there’s a real fine figure of a man, even worse than your father. Only good thing he ever did was realize what a useless piece of shit he is and not knock up some local girl to make a whole pack of drunk, lazy brats. Farl’s going to inherit the bakery, so what are you and Bannick good for once you’re grown? Are you going to paint yourself some bread to eat, Peeta? Or are you going to marry that trashy little Seam bitch you keep staring at and go work down the mines?_

Consciously trying to blot out Jinny Mellark’s angry, shrill words from his head as Aurelius had been teaching him, visualizing shutting the door on the phantom of her in his mind and stepping away, he realized he didn’t have to ask Madge why she had any kindness to spare for Haymitch. Given her mother, Madge knew plenty about people who tried to blot out the unbearable hurt of the world. “I’m sure that he remembers them all,” Peeta told her, now daring to look back at her. “But he’s exceptional in that.” Probably other victors felt sorrow for their dead tributes—he would bet that Chaff, Finnick, and the like didn’t just brush off murdered kids. But probably none of them took the grief to heart the way he knew, in his gut, that Haymitch did. It was the same throbbing ache of guilty regrets and admonishments deep in his heart. _I did everything I could, and she still died. My best wasn’t enough._

“How do you get through this?” she asked him, arms clasped over her chest, head half-bowed. “Now that…that there’s time for it all to sink in. How do you not go crazy?”

“Day by day,” he told her. Seeing her sitting there, seeming so small and alone, he couldn’t help but reach out. It felt unbearable, but at least he wasn’t alone, as he felt he had been for almost all his life. Haymitch cared, Johanna cared. He had Vick and Posy and Lindy. She wasn’t alone now either, stitched into this odd little family they’d sewn together of the raggedly torn bits of other, destroyed families. His slightly cold-stiffened fingers clasping around hers, he felt gratified when he felt her take his hand in turn easily, without hesitation or suspicion. _Not like Katniss,_ some traitor part of his mind whispered. _You remember how she always held back from you, when the cameras weren’t rolling? It was never totally natural with her, she always had to think it over first. And every time she held back, you knew she could see you weren’t good enough for her, even if you felt like you were dying inside with how much you wanted anything, anything at all?_ He flinched at that, feeling sick at the comparison in his mind, irrevocable now that it had been made, and furious with whatever part of him dishonored Katniss’ memory like that. But he didn’t let go of Madge’s hand. He didn’t want her to think he’d rejected her when she needed him. And maybe, just a little, he needed this from her too right now, selfish as it was. “And with some help from friends,” he told her, trying to not put an artificial emphasis on the last word.

He fixed the memory of her smile in his mind, the way her eyes crinkled at the corners, blue and guileless as the sky above, the expression defying the too-pale skin, the too-thin cheeks, the lines of stress and ordeal and weariness still etched in her face. If he could paint that, he’d title it “Hope”. Maybe there was still some of it left in a world, even without Katniss.

~~~~~~~~~~

In some ways, District Thirteen wasn’t that bad for Madge. She’d grown up aware of Capitol eyes, of constantly being watched and expected to behave. The mayor’s daughter was in some ways the least free child in District Twelve. 

And too, considering where she’d been of late, removing the threat of death that had constantly hung over her head the entire time she was in the Capitol certainly helped. Although as she’d told Peeta, without that fear as a focus, all she had now was time to try and worry about that red canyon of death and the sight of her mother and father being shot in front of her eyes. How could schooling seem remotely important or normal after that? But she was only seventeen, and thus Thirteen said that to school she went with the other children, to learn how to be a productive, well-educated member of their society in whatever job they chose for her once her last year of schooling ended.

They were seventeen and eighteen like her, but aside from Peeta, they all seemed so childish, so incurious, so sheltered. They’d been told what to do their whole lives, on a comfortably regimented schedule. They’d grown up secure in their future and their survival. In a way, they reminded her of the unconscious arrogance the Career tributes always seemed to own, well-fed and well-trained their whole lives, that air that spoke of being cared for and valued, the unthinking _not realizing_ of how desperate and terrifying the rest of Panem’s kids had it. Although even Career district children had died in that “fourth Quell” too—children and relatives of victors, they’d grown up with some material comforts, but that hadn’t saved them. They’d been almost as clumsy as any Twelve tribute, and when she closed her eyes at night she could still see the sick, terrified looks on their faces. She’d probably been more ready for it than them, training on the sly as she had. Not that training with a knife had made her any more ready for the stark reality of blood on her hands, of the weight of having taken a life.

How on earth did advanced geometry matter after all of that? She stared down at her textbook, black lines and angles and numbers blurring, her head swimming, the teacher’s nasal drone turning into a background buzz, until she heard the _da-DAAA-da_ three-tone bell that told her the lesson was over, that school was over for the day too. Grabbing her book, she headed out the door. Kids here in Thirteen never chattered and laughed and loitered like they had in Twelve once school was out. They headed right for their quarters for Study Period, obedient and silent.

She waited for Peeta. It always took him longer to walk back to their quarters, still adjusting to his new prosthesis. But they made their way there in good time, and she swiped her key card, letting them in the door. Vick was there already, sitting on his bed with its neatly made covers, had folded down the shelf on the wall that served as a writing desk. She dropped her schoolbag next to her bed and reached for her own desk-shelf. A voice behind her startled her—not Peeta’s but a deeper, rougher-edged voice, a thicker Seam accent. “Vick, it ain’t like those glasses are helping you much,” Haymitch said. “Look, I spent my whole childhood reading things six inches from my nose ‘cause we couldn’t have afforded glasses even if I’d figured it out, so I get it, but my wearing the damn things now, it helps a lot. So let’s get you in for some glasses that’ll actually help you.” 

She’d seen Haymitch in the evenings sitting there, his reading glasses perched on his nose, face impassive in the way that only someone who’d spent time and pain to learn to conceal everything could be, poring over stacks of paper whose contents she’d never asked. War strategy, she supposed, but at that moment, didn’t much want to know.

Vick glanced up, and there was a shimmer in his dark grey eyes that Madge thought wasn’t due only to the distortion of the glass lenses. “Ma got these for me at the Hob,” he murmured, ducking his head. “The only ones they had. And I…I don’t know how…”

Haymitch made a soft sigh, a low note that sounded half like pain, and Madge had the notion that he could imagine too many ways a dirt-poor widowed Seam woman with four kids found the money for a pair of glasses. “We’ll keep the frames, but you should get the lenses replaced,” he told Vick, voice oddly gentle. Vick nodded, turning back to his book.

“Where’s Johanna?” Peeta asked Haymitch, sitting down on his own bed heavily.

“Down seeing Finnick,” Haymitch answered him, face staying impassive. Now he glanced her way. “You have a minute?” he asked her.

She shrugged. “If it takes me away from trigonometry homework, sure.” He smirked a little at that, obviously amused, and she followed him out the door.

She wasn’t sure exactly how he knew where to go, leading her through a series of twists and turns, down one corridor and then the next, and then abruptly pausing before a door. “In there,” he said, gesturing to it.

She turned the knob and pushed the door open, revealing what looked like a closet crammed full of school supplies, with the dusty smell of chalk, the rubbery scent of cheap erasers that crumbled when she tried to erase anything. She glanced back at him, suddenly wary. A grown man asking her to shut herself away with him in a supply closet—oh no, that didn’t raise the alarm at all. She wasn’t quite sure what danger she perceived from him on that, wasn’t like he’d been staring at her breasts, but it just felt off-kilter enough that she wasn’t going to cheerfully do it.

He sighed in a sharp, impatient exhalation, nothing like his sound of weary sadness with Vick. “We don’t get surface liberty today thanks to Coin calling a strategy session and I figure this is one of the few places they’re probably not listening in. So,” he nodded to the closet with an exaggerated, sarcastic motion, “do you mind?” Then he seemed to think better of it, and the tight impatience disappeared from his features as he looked at her—really looked. Something flickered in his eyes, that same pain that had appeared there a few years ago when she’d helped him stumble home from the Hob and he’d looked at her and called her _Maysilee_ and rambled, half-sobbing, about how sorry he was he couldn’t save her, that it should have been him, that he’d made such a fuck-up of everything since. She hadn’t told him that now, looking at those intense, utterly sober grey eyes. If he didn’t remember it, and drunk enough that he saw her as the ghost of her dead aunt he clearly wasn’t in the most lucid frame of mind, bringing up the details could only embarrass him. 

He glanced away, voice gruff as he told her, “I won’t hurt you, Madge.”

She clicked on the light and shut the door behind them. He edged himself against one set of shelves, deliberately giving her as much space as he could rather than crowding in on her in the small closet. But the tingling sense of awareness didn’t quite go away, the sense that while he wasn’t quite invading her space, he encroached on the edge of it. 

He dug in the pocket of his grey trousers, pulled something out. He didn’t grab her hand to give it to her, but held it out in his outstretched arm, clasped lightly between his fingertips, as if giving an offering to a wary animal whose fear he recognized. The gold of the mockingjay pin didn’t gleam in the dim light, but she recognized the pin all the same. “This belongs to you, I think,” and there was a world’s full weight of weariness and meaning in those few words. There was something solemn, almost ceremonial to it. He must have given the effects of dead kids back to their families dozens of times, but this felt deeper than that. _Maysilee_ , he’d called her, and some days it still seemed like it took him a minute to place himself in the present rather than the past, recognize her for herself. 

She’d seen the Quell footage once, when she’d asked her father about her aunt, and as a mayor, he had access to those kinds of things. He’d shown her only those dying moments of Maysilee Donner, and Madge had never asked again. A girl who looked too much like her pressed this same pin into a boy’s hand, both their hands bloodstained, gold bright against the crimson. Suddenly she knew, as certain as she’d been of anything, that he’d brought that same pin back to her mother’s parents, years and years ago. Taken it from a dead girl twice now and offered it up to what remained of the Donners, mute waves of sorrow and guilt and grief radiating off him like heat.

She reached out and took it, and he let it go quickly, as if glad to be rid of the burden. The gold was warm in her hand, from having been carried in his pocket. “You brought this back to my grandparents too.” She stated it as a fact.

“Yes. And you gave it to Katniss after the reaping, because you saw a chance for that mockingjay to be seen and for it to mean something again.”

Somehow she wasn’t surprised he returned the favor and stated his own suspicion as a certainty. “Yes. Did she…” She didn’t want to ask outright about Maysilee, but nobody talked about her. It was one of those things, like sex and politics and the like, that was never discussed at the Undersee house. Only the few times her mother was lucid, and urgently trying to pass on the Donner legacy to her daughter, mouth trembling and eyes brimming as she apologized, shamefaced, for what she’d become. _May was the strong one._

He leaned—sagged—back against a set of steel shelves. “It should have been her that came back,” and she had the sense he’d never admitted that aloud to another soul. “She was the one in there with a plan. Hell, I was just making it all up as I went along. I think she saw the hidden stuff, wouldn’t have screwed up and got Snow’s attention like I did, surviving the way I did. Maybe…”

“No use on ‘maybe’,” she said, unable to listen to it from him, hearing it from Maribelle Donner as she had and drowning in the helplessness of being able to do anything. “We’re where we are now and we have to deal with that.”

He cracked a little smile at that. “You’re a lot like her.”

“You weren’t in love with her, were you?” He’d held Aunt May’s hand as she died, a look of anguish on his face.

“No. I like to think that we could have been friends, after, if we’d both come out of it alive. But no, I had…someone waiting for me. She…well, I thought she died then, but…”

Madge nodded at that, licking her lips, fingers closing tighter around the pin. “I had someone too.” 

“The Hawthorne boy.” Her surprise must have shown because he gave a soft snort of wry amusement. “Don’t worry, I doubt most folks knew. But me, I spent the better part of a couple decades playing a role. I was pretty sure even before you showed up with that morphling for his back. Every time you two were in the room together. Trying too hard to be so casual, see?”

She felt fierce heat rising in her cheeks at that, so sure she and Gale had been discreet. Secrecy was a way of life to her, and as for Gale, well, he’d made it clear he hadn’t wanted to love her, hadn’t come to terms with his feelings for her versus the anger and resentment he still nursed towards the world. Haymitch laughed, but it wasn’t an unkind laugh. But then his voice was sober and regretful as he said, “Easy to forget sometimes how young you are still. You and Peeta both.”

“You were young too,” she murmured, looking away from him. Sixteen when he came back from his Games, before the Capitol took everything away from him. Her mother had been sixteen too, her life destroyed before it was even begun. The pain was right there, like a mountain blocking everything. Everything in her life now had to acknowledge it and try to deal with the obstacle of it—it controlled her life. Maybe it always would. Terror rose within her that somehow, she’d end up like Haymitch, or Maribelle—unable to bear it, drowning it away with chemicals until there was nothing left of her except the pathetic remnants of what she might have been. “I don’t want to end up like you,” she burst out before she could help it, shocking herself. Proper, contained Madge Undersee didn’t blurt things out on impulse, especially not provocative, rude things like that. “You’re different now, I mean, but…” She tried to save it, blushing even more furiously, feeling even more like an idiot.

He didn’t bristle at that. Then again, he’d probably heard far worse. “I wouldn’t want you to go down that road either, sweetheart,” he said, and she could hear that tired, sad man he’d been, right there in his voice. “It ain’t a pleasant journey.” 

The lump in her throat felt too large to bear, like she’d swallowed a stone. “They want Peeta and me to sit there and learn about math and history. Like the Capitol didn’t murder our parents. Like they didn’t help turn us into killers.” As if none of it had mattered, as if she should just forget it and pretend it away, and she was just another seventeen-year-old who’d never had anything happen to her. As if she didn’t have nightmares still and didn’t need to talk to Doctor Aurelius about it. She’d traded a life of secrecy for one of blind denial.

“And what would you rather do?”

“I can fight,” she insisted.

“You got out of that canyon alive. So yep, that’s obvious.” His somewhat flippant tone set her on edge.

“Don’t you dare—“

“I’ve _been_ there, sweetheart,” he interrupted her, grey eyes narrowed. “Don’t forget that.”

He had, and he’d promised to look out for her. Clumsy and uncertain as he was at it, he reminded her so much of her mother, who’d done her best despite her own struggles. “I need _something_ ,” she told him, voice rasping from the force of her own emotions. “I can’t go to class and read books and act like it never happened. There’s a war on. The Capitol…they…I deserve to be able to help take them down, don’t I?”

To his credit, he treated her like someone whose opinion mattered, rather than a whining teenage girl. “Nobody can say you don’t have a stake in this,” he answered, looking her straight in the eyes, and tired as he looked, it was clear he saw her rather than Maysilee. “But make sure it’s justice you want, not revenge.”

“I want to make sure nobody else has this happen to them again.”

“Good enough. Though I’d rather—and Johanna will agree—you didn’t go join the fighting.” He sighed, hand tiredly rubbing his forehead. She still found the sight of him wearing a wedding ring a bit odd. “You’re still so young. You may not feel like it, you probably feel a hundred years old, but you’re still a kid in a lot of ways. I’d as soon not see you throw the rest of your childhood away on making the scars worse. And if you go fight, you will. Trust me. Even the arena doesn’t prepare you for a battlefield.” He spoke with the dark certainty of experience there. “And I think you and Peeta would do each other good if you stick together.” 

“He only wants Katniss.” And in her heart, she still wanted Gale, for all his flaws, because now she’d never have the chance to see if he could have grown out of his prejudices and accepted her, loved her openly. The regret of that never known might-have-been burned at her, just as she imagined it did with Peeta.

“I’m not saying romance.” He shook his head and grumbled, “Teenagers. You can just be friends, you know?”

She couldn’t help but smile a little there, hearing him sound so exasperated and awkward. It couldn’t be easy for him either. Five children and a wife put on him by circumstances. But circumstances had changed, he’d put aside the bottle, and he was doing the best he could. He helped lead this war, and Johanna, who’d been equally reviled, had taken over the mantle from Katniss to inspire people. But more than that, it was the quiet things that gave her some hope. How the two of them tried to look after her, and Peeta, and Vick, Lindy, and Posy, even as they struggled with all their own burdens and nightmares. They woke in the night sometimes still, and she’d hear their quiet voices over in their shared bed. Their expressions towards each other sometimes when they thought nobody else was looking, including each other—that subtle softening, a kind of cautious hope and tenderness that made her think that maybe there could still be something good after all the pain. Maybe it would never entirely go away, but maybe it didn’t have to be the end.

Tears suddenly burned in her eyes as she wondered if her mother might have had the courage to try again, given the open door of a new world and its possibilities. She glanced away from him, well aware of how he saw far too much, and not wanting to be so easily read. “I need something to do, Mister Abernathy,” she insisted again, but gentler.

“Fuck’s sake, just call me ‘Haymitch’,” he said, shaking his head and sighing. “You’re a victor now.” He looked thoughtful, arms crossed over his chest, glancing absently at a stack of notepads. “I can talk to Fog,” he said. “Both you and Peeta already know a thing or two about acting a part and keeping secrets, you think that way better than I ever did at that age. So maybe you can help out with the intelligence network.” He held up a hand to halt her from talking right away. “From here,” he insisted. “That’s the deal.”

It struck her that after losing Katniss, he wasn’t willing to lose her, or Peeta. And maybe after losing all those tributes, she didn’t have the right to inflict more loss on him only for the sake of flinging herself into the fray to try to deal with the pain. She nodded, willing to accept that. He’d find something between throwing her into the bloody hell of the war, and trying to return her to the innocence of the schoolroom. It would be enough to keep her going, and she sensed Peeta would find it a relief too. Her fingers relaxed as she realized she’d clutched the pin too hard and it dug into her hand. “I walked you home from the Hob one night.”

“I remember.” That cautious, cool gruffness crept back into his tone. “Sort of. We got back to the Village and it got through to me that—well, in my head, Maysilee would never want to show up there.” He nodded towards the pin. “Katniss would have wanted you to have that.”

“They’re forgetting her pretty quickly. Her family’s all dead now too.”

“Oh, I know. She’s like pepper now, our Katniss—a little seasoning to the soup, added only when they need to kick up some anger about another dead martyr,” he said dryly. “Otherwise, what’s the fuss about one more dead girl when people are dying out there every day? Plus they don’t want to dilute the message coming from Johanna by dwelling on Katniss. Torch’s been passed, and so on.” He laughed again, and this time it was a cynical, weary sound. “That’s how the whole game works, kiddo.”

“But you won’t forget her.” _Or any of them._

He looked at her, calmly. “No. Never.” He said the words with the solemnity of a vow. He nodded towards the closet door. “Johanna’s probably back from the infirmary, so she and I, we’ve got that damn meeting. Dinner’s in an hour, I’d guess.” He put his hand lightly on her shoulder. “It doesn’t ever all go away,” and she could sense how he struggled to put it to words for her sake, “but maybe it can get better. That’s what we’re fighting for, anyway.”

“Thanks,” she acknowledged as he passed her. He nodded at that and softly closed the door behind himself as he exited the closet, seeming to know instinctively she wanted a few minutes of privacy before she headed back to the room. Gratitude for that unspoken kindness filled her, as she finally gave in and sank to the floor, let it go in thick sobs as she hadn’t since she got to Thirteen, never left alone for a minute. But at least these felt like tears that helped release the pain, rather than multiplying it.


	34. Chapter 34

“What y’all don’t understand is that there’s not one District Four, really, there’s three,” Annie explained to the surrounding troops as they surveyed the bombed-out, cratered, still-smoking ruins of Soledad City. The reports coming in all the while to Twelve over the last two weeks, as they prepared for the final push in Four, was that it had cost thousands of lives and too much in the way of munitions to take Four’s main supply depot and thus cut Four away from the Capitol. 

The sight reminded Johanna too much of Milltown, and so she glanced away. “There’s the far south and west, which is the poorest part, and most of the canneries and processing plants are there. The farthest east, the peninsula, that’s got the prettiest beaches, all that white sand, and it’s all dependent on Capitol tourists. You took the east and the west easy. But the center, that’s something different. The center is prime fishing grounds, some tourism, and all of it. And it’s got Victors’ Bayou, the train lines and roads towards the Capitol, and it’s got the most loyal citizens to the Capitol.”

“And why is that?” Boggs ventured, not sharply demanding, but sounding genuinely interested.

“Because the Capitol’s been generous to Four. Even the east and west folk, they can look at other districts and see they have it so much better. You don’t realize it till you get outside Four, but the center in particular, they lavish a _lot_ on it, keeping us happy and loyal. And why would they want to risk losing everything they have by joining the rebels, and in losing, become as bad off as the rest of you?”

“Didn’t they see what happened to Two last time, in the Dark Days? They stayed loyal and they still suffered.”

“Lose a little or lose everything,” Annie said. “I’m just saying, don’t expect this to be a merry parade through the central district like it was through the outlying lands. They’ll fight. Not because they truly love the Capitol, but because they’re afraid to end this so much worse off by listening to you.”

Johanna could sense the ugly undercurrent to the mood, Annie telling people what they didn’t want to hear. Though she had to admire the woman, speaking up as she did; seemed a lot had changed in Finnick’s absence and Annie learning to stand on her own again. Finnick himself was off grimly practicing his shooting again, ready for the fight when it came, with as much dedication as he had for the last few weeks. 

“It’s different in Seven or Nine,” Johanna agreed. “We have nothing to lose there. We’re starving, medical care’s a joke, everybody dies too young and a lot of people bury at least one kid. The Capitol’s already taking our kids every year, and they’re just meat in the grinder early in the Games to whet the sponsor’s appetites. We’re already the worst kind of slaves. So what do they have to lose by rising up? Them,” she nodded down to the ruins of Soledad, trying to not let her anger stir as she thought about the people there who’d let the Capitol hold innocent children prisoner, “they have farther to fall.”

“Fear’s a powerful thing,” Haymitch agreed softly. “I don’t think we’re gonna sway them with words. It’s going to come down to force.” 

“Soledad falling will help that,” Annie said, her mouth set in a grim line. The faint breeze carried the taste of ash and soot on it, and Johanna turned away and spat, trying to clear her mouth. “It’ll send a message, plus it cuts the coastal communities off from ready Capitol supply.”

“President Coin wants the district secured by New Year’s,” Boggs said, tiredly rubbing his face. “Is that an unrealistic timetable, Annie?” Johanna had noticed him softening, addressing them by their first names—his own little rebellion?

Sitting on her haunches, Annie breathed out a deep sigh. “We’re also not stupid here in Four. You can’t fight the oncoming tide. Keep the pressure up, and I think a lot of ports and villages will let you pass peacefully. Don’t plan on them being a good source of recruits or supplies like the outer ports were, though. It’s one thing to submit. It’s another to join the enemy. And they might not fight for the Capitol, but they probably won’t fight for you either. Not right now. Maybe when they see the war’s outcome is a bit more certain.”

“We don’t need that kind of fair weather bullsh—“ one of Boggs’ staff spoke up, lines of impatience twisting his face.

“We’ll need all the help we can get,” Boggs said, interrupting and staring him down. “Now, on Soldier Cresta’s advice, I suggest we skip the mugging for the camera that Heavensbee wants,” Johanna heard Haymitch’s dry chuckle at that, “and figure out how best to divide and conquer. Squad leaders, to me. It’s going to be a long night.” 

It was a long night indeed, and Coin had no hovercraft to spare as usual to expedite things. Fortunately, they had horses in plenty from Ten, since Soledad City wasn’t that far from the Four border, so the herds arrived in short order. 

It was a familiar feeling, waking before dawn to saddle her horse, though the time away from the hard trail living showed quickly enough, ass and thighs once again growing sore. But at their brief stop for lunch and a rest, and still managed to grin as she told Haymitch, “Like old times, huh?”

“All we need is to go a week without showering and it’s perfect,” he answered, but they both understood the tense laugh they both gave was twanging nerves, not genuine humor. Annie, in contrast, seemed more at ease, given she’d been in Two dealing with converting a hostile population to their side, or maybe it was being back in her home district, or both.

Either way, as Finnick seemed to stay drawn into himself, the old smiles and laughter roused only by Annie, Annie became their passport through Four in a hurried march to the coast, through towns that easily gave way as Annie predicted or offered token resistance at best. “Yeah, I’m letting her do the talking,” Johanna muttered at the first town, Camenida, as Annie talked with the town leaders.

“Good call there,” Haymitch replied.

“I hated her, you know.”

“I know.” He didn’t have to say more than that, and she didn’t have to explain more. He’d been there. He knew how she’d envied and resented Annie for all the privileges she’d seemed to have, how the world seemed to bend over backwards to tell her it was OK that her mind and her will had failed her, while punishing Johanna for the same, and how Annie let herself be weak and coddled.

She’d hated Katniss in the same way, for the obliviousness to how lucky she really was as a victor, how she seemed to treat the world’s kindness as her due and whining about what inconveniences she did have rather than falling on her knees thanking her luck that she’d got off so easily. The boots were on the other feet now. It was Annie with the dead parents and siblings, Annie whose boyfriend had come back to her maimed, and Annie had stepped up, without fanfare or celebration, to come to the front of the fight anyway, and show that she was stronger than anyone had given her credit for being. Maybe even she hadn’t known it, with so many people to lean on. 

Annie had changed, but Johanna had changed as well. Maybe there would have been room to be softer towards Katniss now, the ability to chalk that self-centeredness to naïveté and youth rather than actual selfishness. _But if she’d survived you wouldn’t have been shoved out of your comfort zone. You’d be just one of the Mockingjay’s chief warriors, the vicious axe-killer. And Haymitch would still be hovering around her, focused on her—oho, no spare time to spend on talking to you, worrying about you, Miss Bitchy._

She looked away from Haymitch guiltily at that thought, glancing down at the reins and patting her black mare’s neck in slow strokes, soothing herself as much as the animal. She could be sorry for his sake that Katniss was dead, and for Peeta too, and respect their grief for Katniss as a person, but she couldn’t regret that Katniss’ loss had offered her a way out. Katniss had wanted to die for Peeta, but she’d saved Johanna’s life instead. Johanna couldn’t wish that undone, couldn’t actively want to go back to that small, dark, confined existence she’d led, but in her mind and heart, she promised she’d do her best to make the price worth it. Twenty-three lives bought hers in the arena the first time, but Katniss’ death was the one that purchased her this second chance at life. 

Footsore, hungry, and tired, a week and a half later they reached the sea, having only run into a few minor skirmishes along the way with the Peacekeepers while the locals silently watched, and turned east to sweep their way to meet Boggs’ group at Victors’ Bayou. “Too easy,” Haymitch muttered, and she could have yelled at him for his pessimism, even as she recognized her own superstition in fearing it.

Still, she’d firmly agree it was best not to take a piss on fate and dare it to do its worst. But he was right—that sense of dread hung over her too, waiting for the inevitable. It couldn’t be this easy. Their luck held for another week as they swept along the coast at a steady, relentless pace, hurrying through the raw, wet weather that somehow seemed far colder than the bone-deep dry chill of the Seven winter town. Their ranks even stayed more or less constant, as some of the locals and some of Fog’s revel Peacekeepers joined the cause and replaced the killed and wounded. As Annie predicted, the joiners grew a bit more as they finally saw the way the tide turned. 

The other shoe finally dropped when they surveyed Blacktide Bay, one of the larger port villages, and one of the last obstacles on the route to Victors’ Bayou. Annie’s attempt to negotiate lasted about thirty seconds and then the weapons came out. The fight lasted only five hours, but it was bloody as anything and Johanna wouldn’t easily forget the sight of the hummocks of bodies lying at the water’s edge, delicate curls and plumes of blood flowing into the water and then being swept up by the waves, becoming a reddish current that washed up against the shore.

That night they erected the portable forcefields, as they did every night, to protect their little army from either hostile locals or sneak Capitol air support. She silently thanked Beetee and Wiress for their capability to fine-tune the things as they had, to make them less cumbersome than Seven’s portable units, and operate on a different frequency from the Capitol’s forcefields to make them harder to jam or blow with an EMP. Much as she had as a child out at the lumber camps, she watched as the blue glow crackled through the air and then faded, providing them with a net of safety, and only then did she breathe a little easier.

They tended the wounded that night, re-assessed supplies. When Haymitch came back from a call to Boggs with a grim look and informed them that Boggs’ group was still probably three days out and fighting hard at Port Cypress, they all made ready to settle in for a few days. Victors’ Bayou still lay ahead and that might well be an even worse battle if things went wrong and the right pressure wasn’t applied to make them give in. Boggs went to contact the other group leaders and see how their Treating the wounded lasted until late in the evening. She and Haymitch cleaned their gear, and trudging tiredly out into the town, found a place to stay—no shortage of abandoned houses to commandeer, so she had no intention of sleeping on the ground tonight. They found a house that had been a small cozy guesthouse for Capitolites looking to tour—the boom business was at Victors’ Bayou and as Annie had mentioned, on the beaches far to the east.

She and Haymitch ate syrupy canned fruit and jerky on the porch, and mindful of Finnick’s mutt bite, she lectured Haymitch to check the bandages on his arm again. “Yes, darlin’,” he said with a raised eyebrow, reaching over to spear another slice of peach with his fork. She listened, grateful to not hear the sounds of broken glass or smashed furniture from other houses borrowed for the night—she’d done her best to put a stop to that shit quickly. Frustrations were one thing, but better ways to harness that energy in actually fighting the Capitol, rather than just breaking their shit. Besides, she saw no point freely giving the Capitol ammunition to paint them as simple thugs and brigands.

In the small front room, Haymitch pulled out the datapad and propped it up on the table, among the clutter of books, coasters, and the like. There was a checkers set, missing two of the red pieces, replaced instead with metallic red fishing lures lacking the hook. He pulled up the map, projecting it onto the wall in clear definition.  
She eyed the map as he did, trying to formulate the plan in her mind. He’d never mark it physically, not for positions of their soldiers, or with any kind of actual strategic plan. 

_If we get captured and I can’t destroy the datapad I’m fucked, but better to not fuck everyone else by giving away the game_ , he’d said idly. Damn man could stare at it, maybe now and again mutter and trace things with his finger and then announce something fully formed like he’d created the entire picture vividly in his mind.  
“So Port Cypress?” she asked, pointing at a dot on the other side of Victors’ Bayou.

“If the other group doesn’t take it quickly, we may have to rush in to shore Boggs up,” he said idly, fist underneath his chin as he stared at the map intensely. “Can’t lose that one, not with Victors’ Bayou and the Capitol watching. But we can’t rush in too soon to help him, or the Bayou sees by that we’re already reeling.”

“Well, that’s on Boggs for now, guess we play the waiting game,” she said dryly. “So will you relax a bit?” She reached for the stack of books, leaning back against the couch. The plush rug felt good to sit on, she’d freely admit that.

Impressively large and weighty books with glossy covers, the sort they produced in Seven’s printing houses—known as “coffee table” books, Rhus told her long ago, since the Amsells worked in the bindery during the winter months while the Masons worked in the sawmills. Given nobody in Seven had a table exclusively for coffee, and frequently they didn’t even have coffee anyway and the adults boiled the shit out of week-old grounds to produce something that looked like weak tea, the two of them had laughed about that.

Thumbing through the first one, it was a survey of the industries of Panem. She let out a snort of amusement at the carefully staged shots of Seven lumberjacks, in absurdly tidy clothes all the way to wearing jackets that had never seen a rip or a smudge of sap or dirt—shit, come the worst heat of August, the men and little kids worked shirtless and the women stripped down to their bras, kerchiefs knotted around their brows a bit salt-stiff from being air-dried overnight, and everyone drank water by the gallon. She wasn’t sure whether the average Capitolite would find that display of flesh savage or titillating. Given how they treated the victors from the poor districts, they’d enjoy the raciness of a bit of sexual slumming.

Another book about a century of Capitol fashion trends—nothing at all about the Eight weavers or the One embroiderers and furriers and the like, or the tanners of Ten. Wouldn’t do for anyone out there to get too much truth and put it together. The Capitol worked best when it kept everyone ignorant and divided, including its own to some degree. She noted with some amusement that ruffled or puffy sleeves apparently came back in every fifteen years or so, for both men and women.

The third book—she opened it to the middle, and immediately the familiarity of the face hit her. Chantilly Dumas, but younger—mid-twenties, perhaps, turned away from the camera, an embroidered sky-blue silk robe slipping from her shoulder to show flawless maple-sugar skin and a butterfly tattoo, teak-brown hair drawn aside and draped over her left shoulder. Chantilly looked back at the camera over her right shoulder a slight coy curl to one side of that oh-so-sweet smile above bedroom eyes.  
The photographer knew their stuff full well—the power of erotic suggestion, rather than blatant nudity. Johanna had been so young for most of Chantilly’s years of popularity—Cashmere replaced her when Johanna was thirteen and by then Chantilly was past her Capitol peak anyway—but vaguely she recalled that image of innocence and sweetness, married to One’s seductiveness. She’d been expected to play the role of the virgin and whore all rolled into one, and the photographer captured that image perfectly.

She instinctively turned the page, but that didn’t help. 49th Games turning to 50th, and this face was even more familiar. Haymitch, lounging carelessly by the side of a pool, legs dangling in the turquoise water. Olive skin shining in the sunlight with a cascade of water droplets, curly hair dripping wet, obviously he’d just finished taking a dip in the pool. The waistband of those wet, clinging black swim shorts sunk just a little too low on his hips, and he smirked knowingly at the photographer, eyes intent and one eyebrow cocked, as if daring them to do something about it. If Chantilly had been demurely inviting, this was pure arrogant challenge.

She must have unknowingly made some noise at the sight, because suddenly he was there, leaning on by her shoulder. She saw his face in that moment as she looked up, taut and sick, but he recovered quickly, saying flippantly, “Well, at least you didn’t find that upstairs in one of the bedrooms with the pages all sticky.” He gave her a smirk too to punctuate it, but it looked like a façade to her. He had that smirk that was born of genuine amusement, but this one was the act. He didn’t even bother to fake it to the point of letting it reach his eyes.

“What is this anyway?” she asked.

“Oh, the popular victors back in the day always got a ten year anniversary photo shoot for the Capitol to marvel at images of us victorious little boys and girls all grown up into men and women—while we were still young enough to be good-looking,” he said dryly. “Lapilus Bluestem’s pet project. He’s been retired a good ten years now, so any victor after 54 missed out. Though they speculated he’d come back to do something with Katniss and Peeta’s wedding.” He shrugged in that too-quick, awkward way he still had anytime he had to mention Katniss. “Anyway…there were some ‘behind-the-scenes’ type pictures too for mentoring, but the sexy pictures in particular, nice way for your average Capitol citizen without a trust fund to get a piece of a victory without something as tawdry as a pay-to-view. Spent something like seven hours getting in and out of that damn pool over and over, constantly worrying those swim shorts were gonna fall off.” The smirk stayed on, something terrible and frozen. “They actually used glue on the waist, if you can believe that. Good thing they’d waxed all the hair off me already, right? Now, if you don’t mind,” an exaggerated motion of head and hand towards the map, “I’m thinking more about the immediate future and not getting our asses killed in the next battle, rather than rehashing ancient history.”

She watched as he turned back to the map, too deliberately nonchalant. It took her a moment, but she realized she’d seen the flush creeping its way into his cheek as he turned away from her.

Embarrassment—no, more than that, with awkwardness in the lines of his body, a coiled tension he looked like he was braced ready for a physical blow. Not embarrassment, but sheer humiliation. The photos were tasteful, subtle—art, if she was any judge. But they immortalized him as the role he’d been forced to play, produced in a book that anyone from the Capitol or the wealthier districts could have afforded, splashed all over the printing presses for the Seven workers to see. At least the details of what happened to them in Capitol bedrooms stayed secret. And the pay-to-views still had a pretty limited audience, and only in the Capitol. 

But was the old shame the only thing at work? It felt like it had cut him strangely deeply, for all that the prostitution was no secret and she’d seen him deal with people asking about it. Then it struck her: _Ancient history. When we were still young enough to be good-looking._

True, the Capitol had lost interest in her, but she’d made it happen early, and done it more or less on her terms. He’d played by all their rules to protect people, been the obedient whore for so many years until finally, he grew too old and too drunk and too overweight and too cynical, and they stopped buying. Those scars on his back from Thalius Eland, how casually he’d talked about those final, degrading days that told him it was the end. Then it was years of the Capitol and Twelve and everyone else all looking at him in disgust and telling him he was now worth nothing—worthless, in more than the asking price.

Did he actually mourn the loss of those years of Capitol buyers and Capitol attention, some kind of fucked-up nostalgia? It wasn’t the buyers he missed. It couldn’t be. He wasn’t that screwed up. But he’d looked at himself in that picture, and he’d cringed. She had the sense he looked at himself now, and looked at the man that picture represented, particularly with her right there at the age he’d been when that picture was taken—a young man so utterly confident in his body and his sex appeal. He could never be that man, never be so young again, never be so thin and toned and with skin so flawless. A twenty-six year old man could pull off that photo with the sheer panache of youth. At forty-one, it would look desperate and pathetic.

So he dwelled on the ghost of so many years stolen from him, years where most men enjoyed their raw youthful sexuality. Even that man in the picture was a lie, someone Haymitch had never really been, and never could be. All the years of his young manhood and beyond left him damaged, closed off, admitting to her with such a painful embarrassment that he wasn’t sure whether he’d ever be able feel anything like that ever again, or if he’d buried it away too deep.

It was Haymitch to a tee, of course, turning it into a wry joke and making nonchalant comments about glued-on swim shorts and them ripping out his body hair, just so that the humiliation of it wouldn’t show. Probably because experience had taught him nobody would care if he was in pain, and when he finally couldn’t take anymore and broke, the world would be merciless in its condemnation. Trying to salvage what dignity they permitted him by pretending it hadn’t mattered, that it had even been funny; it was understandable. 

But she couldn’t laugh. She hurt for him, with a swell of emotion that made her panic for a moment. He wouldn’t want pity. But it wasn’t pity, was it? This wasn’t weakness. She wanted to comfort him, wanted to lash out at the people who’d hurt him, wanted…what?

She hadn’t really let herself think about him at all, after how decisively they’d shut that all down years ago. But now she couldn’t help but crack that door a little bit, and really look at him. 

Now it was as if some lens had tilted ever so slightly, and suddenly there he was in a way he hadn’t been before. Yes, he was more careworn, lines etched in his face that would never go away. He was more solid than the litheness he’d own back then, and she suspected no matter what he did, short of starving himself, he’d never get rid of those few pounds that clung to his waist, softening it ever so slightly. The dark hair the Capitol had so religiously stripped off him was there on his forearms beneath his rolled-up sleeves, and showing slightly through the vee of his partly-unbuttoned shirt.

He’d never had an ethereal boyish beauty; it had always been his attitude that kept the buyers with him, even past thirty. But his looks had aged well, and maybe he wasn’t young, but he was pleasant-looking still, particularly now with the lively animation of purpose rather than the sluggishness of abandoning all hope as he’d done for so many of the years she’d known him.

She suddenly wondered what he’d look like giving her that invitation into his bed. Not that smirk that he’d polished and practiced until it became his mask for everything. What he’d look like imbued with that sheer confidence about himself and about sex—shit, she couldn’t even imagine exactly how he’d look, but the very idea of it roused her anyway, and suddenly she ached for him, in an unfamiliar way that had nothing to do with the old desires for power or reassurance. This was something different, and more. He wasn’t a threat to be mastered like those Capitol assholes in the clubs, or a frame for her to hang her own needs upon, as he’d been all those years ago, as Finnick had been, as Rye and Spark had been.

She didn’t want the man in that Bluestem picture, didn’t even want the man he’d been seven years later when she slept with him in a desperate panic, a man still with traces of that youthful grace and leanness. She wanted the man sitting there, the man of forty-one who’d stayed by her side through all of this and supported her and laughed with her and fought with her and bled with her, the man who cared for kids that might not be born of his blood but whom he couldn’t bear to see cast adrift, as both of them had been.

She wanted to hug him, hear him laugh in earnest, maybe even more than she wanted to fuck him. That wasn’t an itch, or even friendly comfort. She loved him. She couldn’t deny the truth of that anymore, in the secrecy of her own heart, and it had come over her slowly enough she hadn’t realized it until now, because maybe right until that moment she hadn’t really looked at him as a woman looking at a man who’d become dear to her, mentally trying him on as a lover, and fitting all the pieces together so it was finally clear rather than hundreds of disjoint little bits of feeling and thought. 

She loved him, wanted him, and he didn’t love her. Not that way, anyway. He’d fuck her if she asked. He’d made that clear. But she’d made it equally clear he didn’t want a performance out of him, however skilled. She wanted to see him take back that part of himself and see him alight with passion and enjoyment if he ever came to her, seeing her in all her flaws and still loving her enough to want to let her in as close to his body and his heart as she could possibly get. And now, in her heart of hearts, she feared maybe he never could, and she’d never want anyone else the same way. With any other man would just be fucking, and she’d had enough meaningless fucking to not really care if she ever had it again.

Opening that door was probably a mistake, because now she couldn’t close it. But she wouldn’t, couldn’t, force her desire on him. She was well aware what made him tick, and how he’d give in and forget whatever he felt only to make her happy. Sex had to be something he wanted for himself, so she’d have to keep her mouth shut for now. Besides, she’d started to learn some patience. Even if he turned to her right now and said he wanted her, if she jumped on him right now, it felt like it would be as much simply proving that they could do it, and she didn’t want that tainted by fear. They had so much beyond that, and she wouldn’t see it ruined. “Let’s talk Victors’ Bayou,” she said, decisively shutting the Bluestem book with a loud _thump_ , forcing herself to turn the topic and focus on something else to clear her mind. Everything had changed, aligning in a new way, but she wouldn’t let it show. “You think they’ll cave seeing us coming from both sides?” 

He seemed relieved she wasn’t going to pursue the photo shoot topic any further. “That’s the hope. They’re not stupid, anyway. And having Annie—and Finn, if he’s up to it—that’s gonna be helpful. They’re familiar faces. Hopefully they can help talk people down.”

She let out a tired laugh. “More than me making speeches, anyway. Though, really, been kind of nice to be out in the field here and not have everyone fawning over me.”

“Ah?” Another of those seemingly meaningless words that from anyone else she might have taken as being fobbed off, but from Haymitch, it simply meant that yes, he was listening and prompting her to go on, without trying to direct the conversation by saying anything of his own thoughts. It had frustrated her at first, noncommittal and thus empty bullshit as it seemed, but she’d realized eventually that it served its purpose. It told her he’d listen, and think, and then give her his opinion, and sometimes she just needed to let it all out in one shot, without worrying about interjections.

“Funny how things shifted all of a sudden and everybody loves me,” she said bleakly, pressing her back against the firm frame of the couch. “Apparently I was a bitch and a slut only because the Capitol made me play the part and I strictly followed their orders. Shit, it’s magic—suddenly I’m a sweet little good girl again. Like it never happened. Like the Capitol me was just an ugly dress they made me wear and now it’s been burned and we’ll never talk about it again. Except maybe to cry about how terrible they were to me when it serves a purpose. But to them, that person, she was never _me_ , you know?”

She looked over at Haymitch, sitting there by the coffee table, arms folded over his chest, still listening. She nodded, cueing him in that yeah, she was more or less done, that it was a short ramble. He nodded in return and told her, “They want to keep their heroes simple. So they see what they need to see.” He didn’t say _Just like with Katniss,_ but he didn’t have to, because she heard it anyway.

“The Phoenix,” she answered tiredly, glancing down at her hands, picking at a loose cuticle. So much easier for them to adore a righteous victim who’d only put on an act all along, who could doff it instantly like a discarded mask and show they’d really had a heart of gold all that time, rather than a victim who’d actually gone rotten in some ways and who’d always have to fight that dark streak in her. They wanted the cancer of the Games to have not riddled and rotted their idol—they needed her to be clean and pure as new-fallen snow underneath it all. Their idea of the Phoenix, that was as much of a lie as the vicious “bitch with the axe” had been on the Capitol’s part. “Well, at least you know me, for real, and you’re still here. So…thanks for that.” It seemed such a stupid, trite thing to say, but she couldn’t say what she really felt, and so instead she sounded like an idiot teenager.

He’d repeatedly seen her at her worst and lowest, and it wasn’t like he was someone who blindly saw only the best in people. He didn’t look at her with fervent worship or adoration, because he’d gotten too close, seen too much, for that. At least there was one person she didn’t have to pretend around, or feel guilty and shitty because they were too far above her, and there was an honesty to it that was a relief. He glanced at her, arms draped over his knees, and said hesitantly, “I think…sometimes, people like you and me, we need someone who understands just how deep the hole is. So when you can’t see beyond your worst, they’ve seen it too, but they can tell you that’s not all there is to you.” He paused, a little too long, and added gruffly, “After all, you’re my friend.”

She could have laughed at that: _You’re my friend._ Good thing she hadn’t said everything. Always just a friend, and that was how it always went, stabbed again with that unknowingly dismissive kindness. “Yeah,” she said, feeling like she’d swallowed a heavy lump of iron. But it wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t rejecting her for someone else, had never misled her or lied to her. They all thought she was brash and brave, but love was the one area she didn’t have a prayer, and never had. Never the right man or the right time, it seemed. If she’d come across Haymitch ten years earlier—but no use thinking like that. 

Some days she was pretty sure Rhus hadn’t really loved her either, that he’d loved some image he’d created of her after her Games dirtied her name so much. She’d never know for sure, but when push came to shove, he hadn’t fought for her, hadn’t insisted that the person she pretended to be to chase him away wasn’t the girl he’d supposedly loved so deeply. But she couldn’t blame Rhus for that. He’d done what she wanted him to, what she had to make him do. 

Nine years older, she could face it this time with a calmer perspective. Her world had grown—she might cringe at the idea of the Phoenix as their pet warmonger, but if they insisted on the bird metaphor, she’d spread her wings again since being thrust into the role, and found that perhaps they weren’t crippled or plucked as she’d imagined. She had her mom and dad again, and hopes of maybe seeing Heike and Bern. She had Lindy, Posy, and Vick, and even if it was a different kind of affection with them being older, Peeta and now Madge. Even if he never would love her in the romantic sense, Haymitch cared about her, had willingly stretched the boundaries of his own isolation and fears to be there for her. Her life wasn’t a barren wasteland anymore. That made her heart bittersweet in that moment, rather than agonized and angry. “Hey, you’ve always been honest with me,” she told Haymitch, trying to make it the compliment it should be, not letting any sorrow show. He’d showed her far more of himself than anyone since his Games—that meant something.

His expression darkened at that, something tense and drawn, and abruptly then it smoothed over, calm. He nodded, though from the way he wasn’t quite looking at her, it was more for him than her. “If,” he began, then hesitated, as if unsure where to go from there, and then forged on again, “no, I mean, so long as we’re in this together, but I don’t expect you to hold back just because I’m such a damn mess. So if there’s ever another man, someone who can…give you what I can’t, I promise I won’t stand in your way.” He looked up, gaze meeting hers. “In fact, it’s probably better you let me know. I’ll help you figure out how to keep it quiet so Plutarch doesn’t shit a brick about the publicity. You deserve to be happy.” 

She could have laughed, but he might take it as her mocking him. The laughter would have been for the strangeness of it—him caring enough to not only offer her that freedom, but willing to deliberately protect her as she technically cheated on him. _You deserve to be happy._ Nobody had ever said that to her before. Nobody had ever cared enough to put her first. “Yeah, so do you,” she told him. He gave her another of those not-smiles that told her he didn’t quite believe it.

He fell asleep quickly that night, but she lay awake, hearing his even breathing, the occasional soft but non-urgent mutters that told her at least he wasn’t having a nightmare. Whether it was Victors’ Bayou or Haymitch or everything that weighed on her, she wasn’t getting to sleep anytime soon. Slipping her trousers back on, padding downstairs and pulling on her unlaced boots and her jacket, she opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch.

Two houses down she saw another figure in the shadows of that porch, raising a hand in greeting to her, and it took her a moment to identify it as Finnick. Looked like she wasn’t the only one with a weight on her mind tonight, and it was an easy decision to head over there. 

He gestured her to one of the rocking chairs with his one hand. “Sit yourself down, Jo. Nice of you to keep me company, huh?”

“Annie asleep?” she asked, nodding back towards the house as she tucked herself up in the chair, legs drawn up into the seat, arms around them.

“Like a baby, once she thought I was sleeping,” he replied, crossing one leg over the other, stump of his missing left arm resting on his thigh. “She worries, of course. That it’s too much for me.”

“Join the club,” she muttered, jerking her chin back towards where Haymitch slept.

“Guess I owe you both some overdue congratulations there, huh?”

“We’d have saved you some wedding cake,” she made the joke, recognizing it was a feeble one. But her tongue wouldn’t shape the words to tell him that she’d wanted him there, how much she’d worried over him, how much she’d been afraid he was dead. 

“The official story is you two have had some kind of a spark for a few years, but it’s only now you can do something about it.” Finnick said it neutrally, but she heard the question anyway. “You always did seem…close.”

She snorted, shaking her head. “Finn. You know us both. It’s not like either of us let _anyone_ in these last years. It’s just a publicity marriage, like it was with Katniss and Peeta. Coin wouldn’t let us keep the kids otherwise, with married couples in Thirteen ready to adopt.”

“Although you and I both saw that our Mockingjay actually did love her particular publicity stunt. And he loved her.”

“I’m not Katniss,” she reminded him, hearing the harsh edge to her tone, surprised to realize she hadn’t felt like she needed to draw that line so clearly in months. “He’s not Peeta.”

“Of course you’re not. So you’re still just friends.”

She choked down the laugh that threatened to burst free. “Yeah.” She was tempted for a moment to spill her guts. Finnick was the next closest thing she had to a friend, or at least, he had been, and the desire to make sure those old ties were still there and still mattered was sudden and sharp. But she wouldn’t tell him. His life was in such a shitty place right now that mewling about her romantic woes seemed too selfish. It was a funny tipping of the balance. Now she was the one with things falling into place, while his life had fallen apart. But at least he still had Annie, and that was the thing that gave her some hope. 

Besides, it wasn’t like she’d ever been there as a sounding board for him with Annie, so she hadn’t exactly earned the right to put that burden on him anyway. “How are you doing?” It sounded so stilted to her. Gentle courtesies weren’t her thing. 

“Better,” he said, resting his chin in his hand, tipping his head slightly aside. “They all still feel sorry for me, of course. Poor crippled Finnick. But I’ll show ‘em. I can still do what needs to be done.”

“Sure you can.” He seemed much calmer now, as if the frenzied, driven agitation of the weeks in Thirteen and early on the warpath here had faded now that he’d seen he wouldn’t be shut out, that he could contribute. Johanna hadn’t asked outright, but Annie’s comments made her think Finnick hadn’t slept with Annie since his return. A sudden pang hit her with that—if Haymitch looked at his “before” picture with embarrassment for how it stacked up against the “after” picture, maybe Finnick did as well, scarred and one-armed now, faced with that young, effortlessly sexy Finnick who’d been almost too pretty. “You’re lucky to have Annie, she’s a good sort,” she told him, giving him the truth that she couldn’t bear to consider six years ago, able to finally not resent him for what happiness he’d had, and only hoping he could get it back. Hoping too that the same murky darkness in her, and in Haymitch as well, hadn’t crept into Finnick’s heart, and he wasn’t here doing something stupid like seeking his own end in a battle he couldn’t win, rather than face a life he couldn’t near. “She would have gone to hell itself to get you back, and killed anyone who stood in her way.” 

The pang of guilt hit her again that she hadn’t been there to help rescue him. Tough choices—the needs of the many in taking Milltown against her personal need to look after Finnick. She’d done what she had to do, but she didn’t quite know how to make it up to him now. But at least he hadn’t shoved her away. He’d always been a far better person than her. “I know. She’s the best thing I’ve ever had,” he replied, voice so soft she barely heard it. They sat there in silence for a while, watching the winter darkness. Those had been the best times with Finnick—just silent understanding. 

Finally the chill of the night started to nip at her enough to be uncomfortable. With that, she got to her feet, squeezed his shoulder with her hand. “Get some rest. I know going back to Victors’ Bayou won’t be easy for you.” His family had died there, and Mags wouldn’t be there either. It would be like that homecoming back to Seven for her, all those years ago, cutting into a still-raw wound. 

He didn’t answer her, which pretty much confirmed it for her. She headed down the steps, light-footed, and watched to see him heading indoors again, back to Annie. _You’re better for him than I’d have ever been,_ she could acknowledge it without reluctance now. Quietly heading back upstairs, she kicked off her trousers again and slipped in bed beside Haymitch, reveling in the warmth beneath the covers. He stirred slightly, but then settled again. 

Even that short while with Finnick had helped her gain some perspective, and there was a sort of peace in her heart from it. She’d gotten better than she deserved already, and if that didn’t include Haymitch wanting her in return, she’d endured far worse than that. So she’d do her best to be grateful for what she had, and take joy in it, rather than fuss over what she didn’t.


	35. Chapter 35

They met Bogg’s forces only ten miles north of Victors’ Bayou, and Haymitch noted that even with the tan-skinned Four locals he had obviously picked up along the way and those that sat in the saddle with that impeccable posture that spoke of their being rebel Peacekeepers, their eastern force was very definitely depleted. The lines of strain etched deeper on Boggs’ face made it evident too, as Haymitch rode up to greet him. The man looked like he hadn’t slept a full night in weeks, pale blue eyes bleary and red-rimmed.

It wasn’t as cold as the north, or the mountain hollow where he’d been born and raised, but the damp Four cold had descended on them all anyway, like a freezing mist that seeped into the core of all of them. The cold winter sun shone down on them all, and the patched coats and too-few gloves and hats told the tale. Thirteen’s supplies were stretched to breaking now to supply the field troops, and with Eight still in Capitol hands, they’d have to make do and pray they managed to capture Victors’ Bayou, and then Seven once they had a chance, without losing anyone to hypothermia or amputations. _Coin says ‘non-essential district’, my ass,_ looking at the ragged and cold fighters.

“We have coffee, at least,” he offered to Boggs. “We, ah, ‘liberated’ it from some of the villages we passed through. It’s that chicory stuff,” a local affectation that had never made it up to the Capitol, “but…it’ll warm your folks up.” At sixteen, he’d hated the stuff, but he’d welcome it during Katniss and Peeta’s Victory Tour, with as bitter as that winter had been. Probably didn’t hurt that after years of the harsh bite of white liquor, his numbed taste buds didn’t react all that much to the chicory as he slugged the coffee down, trying to keep warm, keep awake, and keep off the bottle as much as he could to give the kids as much help as possible. The taste of that coffee now felt almost decadent, a layered explosion of flavor. He dreamed of the taste of things now, especially when they were back in Thirteen and eating bland cafeteria rations, because now he actually could taste it all again. 

Boggs’ lips twisted at that in a tired approximation of a smile. “Haven’t had coffee since I left Ten when I was young, actually.”

“Promise I won’t tell Ma Coin,” he promised dryly, and Boggs chuckled softly at that.

Johanna trotted up to join them just then. “Is this meeting for cockwaving only,” she quipped, “or can I play too?”

“You’re more than welcome,” Boggs reassured her, and Johanna huffed out a small sigh of irritation that turned into a misty puff of breath in the crisp air. Haymitch hid a smile—yeah, of course she was annoyed that Boggs played the straight man, no fun.

“So, what are we expecting here?” Boggs said, nodding down the rutted, muddy road towards Victors’ Bayou, the soil that rich ochre red of south Panem that would stain everything it touched and reminded Haymitch too uncomfortably of blood. Every night, cleaning off the horses, the mud-spattered legs and bellies of the damn animals looked creepily macabre.

Johanna looked over at Haymitch, that sharp and inquisitive hawk’s-eye glance she had. “You’ve been here more recently than me,” she said dryly. “And Annie’s had instincts dead to rights so far on the rest of Four, but don’t know, I’d say most people are probably a bit nearsighted about their hometown.”

It was December now, and the painful weight of the realization that he had, in fact, been here just about a year ago now hit him and stole his breath for a moment. He did his best to file away the anxious glances towards the kids, seeing how they were struggling on the last third of the Tour, mouthing their provided lines tiredly. He focused instead on how he’d tried to judge the crowd and their mood—Career district, and Katniss’ tracker jacker stunt had killed the Four girl, Raisa. But not nearly so personal and ugly as it would be in One, with Glimmer and Marvel, or Two with Cato and Clove.

“Mixed,” he admitted. “It wasn’t as much a given as it was in Eleven, or Eight. There were definitely people pissed off that the kids survived by bucking the rulebook—like Annie said, Career districts are protective of that line, because it’s what keeps them from falling down into the shit with everyone else.” Chantilly had taught him that lesson that long ago. “But yeah, there were some people listening, and angry, and it wasn’t because they’d lost the Games that year.” They’d kept the other victors away, as always happened during the Tour so it would be all about the previous Games and they could make a big special broadcast of the new victor’s first meeting with the old ones the next year. He sure as shit wasn’t going to confide anything in Effie Trinket, and the kids had enough on their plates. So he’d naturally kept his thoughts to himself: that the other swell of anger wasn’t towards Katniss and Peeta for Four’s dead tributes or their bending the rules, but a simmering unrest at recognizing they were being fed bullshit with those shiny, shallow Capitol lines, and not understanding why. They’d looked for a bright spark and instead got a wet fizzle. “Might be as we’ll get a warmer welcome.”

“I asked Finn’s opinion,” Johanna said, leaning forward in her saddle and frowning, brow furrowed. “He said he thought Victors’ Bayou would give in easy and we should ride in relaxed and with our weapons down so we don’t come across as hostile.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” Haymitch muttered, not able to reconcile it. “Annie’s imagining they’ll stand their ground, Finn’s telling us to walk in like we’re old friends.” Chalk it up to two different views, he decided, and it looked like Johanna was right about people having some blindness about their hometowns. 

“With all due respect to Finnick,” Boggs said, shaking his head, “he’s been in Capitol captivity for months and subjected to who knows what—“

“Don’t you dare call him ‘crazy’, Boggs,” Johanna said, bristling, her fingers tensing on her reins, eyes snapping with sudden fire. “Or Annie. Or any of ‘em.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Boggs answered her coolly. “But he’s been under a lot of stress, and he hasn’t been out in the war to see the tone of things the way Annie has up in Two. I don’t want to pick a fight if one’s not needed, but riding in completely unprotected? We’re sitting ducks if they do want to resist, and don’t imagine for a minute they haven’t heard about Blackwater Bay and Port Cypress falling. They _know_ we’re coming and they’ll be ready if they’re going to fight us. And I tend to think if they wanted to talk peace, they’d probably have sent a messenger ahead.”

“All right,” Johanna accepted that, relaxing only with a visible effort.

“Though now that you mention, _should_ we send a messenger?” The idea had some merit. “Give them the chance to stand down.”

“They could shoot the poor son of a bitch on sight, you know,” Johanna reminded him.

“I know.” If Boggs hadn’t been there, he might have added a sharp, _Don’t think I’d risk someone’s life easily_ , but from the look on her face, that steady gaze and the slight nod of acknowledgment she gave him, she already understood it.

“He’s got a point,” she told Boggs. “If we can avoid riding in armed and ready and provoking a battle where it’s a damn certainty more than one person dies…”

“Volunteer only,” he said, feeling it needed to be stated. Milltown, and Johanna’s speech, and the sacrifices made there by the EMP team, taught him plenty. Everyone from Four and other places came here to fight of their own free will, and so far as he was concerned, he led soldiers by his ability of persuasion and their own willingness to follow, not by force. He’d gotten too close to the Capitol and seen too many rotten types in power to trust that simple authority itself was any kind of natural recommendation for following someone. Anyone from Thirteen ought to be as free as the rest of their little army, at least until they got stuffed back in that damn steel can they lived in and Coin took over their existence once again. But he’d have none of the Thirteen crap of simply ordering some random luckless bastard to take the risk. He’d let Katniss go to her death unaware of the full depths of the game she was playing—never again.

Boggs glanced around at the people around them. Haymitch could admit to himself he hated the word “soldier” to refer to them, given the way Thirteen constantly used it and how they reduced people to faceless numbers, how they accepted the casualty reports with barely a flicker. Just the same way he could never hear the word “tribute” now, even if it didn’t refer to a person, without instinctively cringing. Fighters, warriors, call them whatever, although Johanna had pitched a fit when Plutarch and company had tried to dub them her “followers”. _I’m not a fucking goddess,_ she’d snapped.

“All right. We’ll send a messenger and give them until two PM to respond. I don’t want to give them too long in case they send for reinforcements—the forcefield may keep us safe from the air, but if they manage to get enough ground troops here, or stir up locals we’ve pacified, we’re surrounded in our nice safe little bubble.”

“And if an attack’s gonna be made,” Haymitch pointed out, “best we get it going in daylight as well.” He pointed skyward to where the pale, feeble winter sun struggled to rise. “Shortest days of the year we’re in right now, after all.”

“Yeah, that’s been an issue, right,” Boggs murmured, more to himself than in direct reply, with a wide-eyed look of surprise on his face. That said plenty, Haymitch supposed: putting a man of near fifty belowground for twenty-five years so he forgot a simple thing any human ought to have as instinct, the gloomily short winter daylight right before New Year’s.

“No Finnick, no Annie,” Johanna said firmly. Boggs didn’t argue that, obviously seeing that handing over a victor as a potential hostage was a bad idea. “But if someone local is willing to go, that may come across better than an outsider riding in and trying to give them the message.”

In short order, the volunteer tore down the trail, one of the Four natives they’d picked up along the way, taking one of the freshest horses with her and kicking up the thick mud in her wake. Haymitch watched her go, wondering all the while what reception she’d find in Victors’ Bayou, but the sound of raised voices had him turning back quick enough that he jerked the reins as he did so, sending his horse shying with a squeal of alarm.

“…clothing is getting rather ragged, Johanna, and Cinna _did_ make a uniform for Katniss that we could alter…” Effie told her. It surprised him she seemed to have taken to becoming part of the camera crew as she had, coming out into the field like this. Although being Effie, she still fussed about missing her creature comforts, but she didn’t quit. He’d give her that much. He supposed anything was better than sitting in Thirteen, aware of being utterly alien and suspected. “Is it that Katniss…well…it’s unfortunate that she’s…she’s gone…” The quiver in Effie’s voice didn’t surprise him as much as it did some of the others, from their expressions. She might have been so dismissively horrible towards the poor Twelve tributes in almost all the years he’d been around her that he pretty much had to drink even more in her presence to not want to strangle her on a daily basis, but she’d come to genuinely care for Katniss and Peeta.

Johanna plucked at the mended arm of her grey overcoat. “Let me learn you something here. Out in the districts, we don’t give a shit about wearing dead peoples’ clothes. Can’t afford to be that squeamish. But that uniform? We've been through this before. It was made for someone who was, oh, forty pounds lighter than me. That’s more than a little alteration, and let’s not try to make me into her by having me wear it. Besides, if they all don’t get new clothes this winter against the cold,” she swept her arm out to indicate everyone around them, “then hell, I don’t either.” She earned some roars of approval for that, and he caught the slight, self-conscious smile on her lips for a moment as she heard it.

He couldn’t help a smile at that, the fierce glow of pride and affection filling him. There she was, on her horse on a rutted, muddy road, dressed in her shabby clothes with a rifle on her back and that bright red bandana armband knotted around her biceps. Ready for the fight and looking like any of the rest of them, except for the hatchets at her belt. But it wasn’t the axes that marked her—it was the proud angle of her chin, the fire in her eye, and the determination on her features as she declared defiantly she was no better than any of them. On fire in her unique way, a woman who’d been through the worst kind of hell and come back from the ashes, and that was something special. Not so much her as the Phoenix, though he was sure they could make that image iconic, but simply as herself, as Johanna. 

Even as he admired her in that moment—all right, loved her—another image of her flickered in his mind. Bright sunlight made the gold of her skin and the pink flush of arousal glow against the clean white sheets of his bed back in Twelve, because he recognized that headboard. That wavy brown hair of hers, now grown out a bit these last five months, spread out across the pillow. Her eyes wide and dark with passion, but they were still full of that fierce intensity. She laughed, a carefree sound, reaching for him knowingly, confidently. Shocked as he was by the unexpectedness and vividness of it, the image suddenly vanished like a rabbit bolting for its burrow. 

_What the fuck was that?_ He’d never seen that Johanna in reality, that was for damn sure. She’d been a scared seventeen-year-old who hadn’t laughed or initiated anything, and he’d tried to not look at too much, all too readily sensing her fear and self-consciousness. But that woman he’d just imagined—no, definitely not a teenager’s body, or a teenager’s shyness. 

_That’s the way she’d be,_ he realized. _Who she is now._ And even more startling, he felt the pull within him towards that Johanna he’d conjured, because he wouldn’t have imagined it if he didn’t want it, didn’t want _her_. Still, it wasn’t an overwhelming need to immediately fuck her silly, and his trousers didn’t get uncomfortably tight. Not like he’d have to go jerk off before he could focus on anything else. It was more of a quiet thing, a small gasp of air after years buried beneath the ice, but it was there, indelible and undeniable, and he couldn’t undo it. Not that he’d want to undo it. He looked down, not able to look at her just that moment, saw his hands shaking, and wrapped his fingers back around the reins to help steady them.

A small awakening, but it meant more than he could say. It meant—oh, how he hoped it meant—that maybe there was more there waiting to come back from the thaw, that he hadn’t lost everything forced into playacting in all those Capitol beds. It wasn’t like everything had unlocked, far from it. The thought of actually having sex with her was still more than enough to stop him in his tracks, and not with dizzying lust. More like terror, imagining being so set in playing a role he couldn’t ever entirely get away from it, and even if he could open himself up like that, imagining being touched and trying to not flinch or freeze up, imagining frightening her given her own psychological scars. The first signs of having desire for her were there, but the desire itself, that sheer raw craving for the feel of sex, well, that was another story—likely not a coincidence that he’d vividly imagined her in his bed wanting him, but not actually the sensations of it.

But he’d learned patience. There might be a path out of the brambles now, whereas for two decades he’d been lost. Still no expectations that she’d want him and that he’d ever have that little fantasy become anything like reality, but even if not, she’d helped him be steady enough to regain that much of his self. For that, he couldn’t do anything but love her all the more, like an idiot moth helplessly drawn even closer to a candle flame. Drawn in even deeper like that, it might hurt in the end. But in these last months, he’d discovered that so long as there was at least some hope, he might withstand the risk of pain. Better that than to feel nothing at all, because he knew that all too well, drowning it all away in a sea of white liquor when there was nothing ahead but the certainty of hurt and loss, over and over. 

Sensing someone alongside him, he looked up to see she’d trotted over. “You all right?”

He’d learned against unbearably high stakes how to lie and be believed, how to not let everything within him show on his face. So he easily looked her in the eyes. “Yeah, fine,” he told her, and it wasn’t really a lie. 

Everybody dismounted, settling in for a spell, as there was nothing to do now but sit and wait for that messenger to come back. His fingertips started to feel the cramping cold inside his mended gloves, torn up ragged back in the fight for Milltown, and so he accepted a cup of coffee with gratitude. At least both of them weren’t at the end of their endurance physically and emotionally as they had been. The fights here in Four, what fights there had been, were skirmishes more like they’d experienced back in Nine and Ten.

“New Year’s is coming,” she said, perching on a knee coming off a gnarled old cypress, feet pressed against the column of it to brace herself.

“Very observant,” he said, giving her that sly grin over the rim of the cup.

“We should do something for the kids, I mean.”

She was right about that. It had been such a shitty year for all of them. Not that they wouldn’t be thinking of their real parents anyway. “Whatever we can bring ‘em that Thirteen won’t confiscate,” he said, weary at the thought. “Which pretty much means it’s gotta be food, or something equally disposable—or else something they can keep tucked away in the room, like a book. Can’t give ‘em clothes or the like that’ll be seen.” Never mind that Vick apparently had hit a bit of a pre-adolescent growth spurt, starting to outgrow his clothes—Jonas’ son, so Haymitch didn’t doubt that years down the road he’d probably top out slightly over six feet as his father and eldest brother had done. But they’d been so-helpfully informed by Supply that Vick couldn’t be issued more clothing until six months after his last withdrawal.

 _It’s all right,_ Vick said. _I mean, we’re all used to making do._ That calm acceptance hurt like hell, and every time Haymitch caught a glimpse of those thin wrists poking out of too-short sleeves, it poked again at his temper. Maybe Vick wasn’t dressed in patched hand-me-down rags—although the longer Eight stayed in Capitol hands the larger that possibility became—but weren’t they fighting for something better than just making do? “Should get together with the others when we get back,” he mused. “If nothing else, Taffeta, Cee, and Georgie ought to be able to help with some alterations if we ask, and maybe we all can swap some clothes around. Everyone’s kids are growing, after all.”

“Trust you to find a way around the rules, devious as you are,” she said dryly, but her lips curved up in a little smile anyway. “Four’s got all sorts of shit available we could only dream of as kids—maybe less with the war on and last winter’s shortages. But Victors’ Bayou is probably the sweetest apple of the lot.” 

“Hopefully they’ll still have some goodies around, and we can at least bring them a few things.”

“Be nice to celebrate for a change,” she said lowly, but loud enough that she must have wanted him to hear. “Even if we can’t have most of the traditions.” 

“Yeah.” Too many New Year’s sitting alone in that house, not bothering to light a candle in the window, well aware nobody would stop by. Even last year, neither Katniss nor Peeta had bothered, and he hadn’t been let down because he hadn’t had any expectations. Much as the Capitol liked to crow about his resurgence, much as a few people in Twelve would once again almost look him in the eye, nothing had really changed. It was this year that life was alive again with possibility. And Johanna was right that they couldn’t light a candle in Thirteen, or do that thing with decorating a tree that she told him they did in Seven. But they’d have each other, and the kids, and their parents as well. That felt like the best New Year’s gift he could have gotten—and if he had a moment where he imagined the missing space where one slightly grouchy dark-haired girl might have been, he’d do his best to not let that dampen what goodness there was.

~~~~~~~~~~

The forests of Four were unfamiliar to her: the blood-red earth, the ripe, earthy smell even in the chill, the weirdness of the cypress swamps with their treacherous ground and the lacy wisps of moss hanging from twisted old branches like fragile streamers. But dusk fell in a familiar way, a sudden descent with lengthening shadows between the trees creating a darkness with weight while the sun was still peeking from the horizon, and her old childhood instincts wanted to insist on getting that forcefield up. It might be alligators and wild boar out there rather than forest cats and honey bears, but the healthy respect for the night woods was there anyhow, bred into her as much as golden skin and brown eyes.

“Shit,” Boggs muttered, “they must have captured our messenger.” Haymitch shot Johanna a steady look that she could read even in the twilight, and which said clearly what his lips didn’t: _More likely they killed her._ “Get the forcefields up. We’ll attack an hour before dawn.”

Before dawn, the lack of light would be against them still, but the element of surprise was worth it. Johanna steeled herself up, well aware she wouldn’t sleep much tonight, poised on the edge of another potentially rough fight. Victors’ Bayou wasn’t just another small port or village, and they would be ready, likely had been preparing since they’d heard about their outlying neighbors falling to the rebels, one by one. It wouldn’t be as bad as Milltown, but it wasn’t an easy apple for the picking. 

Sitting there, she and Haymitch didn’t say much of anything to each other, neither of them in the mood to sleep, and talking about the kids or anything else would have felt off. She had to able to shut that all away when the fight began. 

But his simply being there and not needing to talk to fill the air between them was a comfort. She’d come to rely on his being by her side. The more she thought about it in the still hours of the night when sleep eluded her, the less it hurt that he’d probably never love her, fully and passionately. 

He was there, steady and caring and offering her a hand without pity or judgment when she needed it and letting her stand on her own two feet when she didn’t. Wasn’t that love, in the end? Did love really have to be defined by whether or not they fucked?

 

He’d told her she could fuck other people and he wouldn’t mind. At first blush, it hurt, feeling dismissed and rejected once again. But he’d offered her his throat on their wedding night back in Thirteen, admitting openly how screwed up he was when it came to sex, no evasions or hiding it behind snarky quips. He knew her history damn well, how careless and cruel she could be, how she could have used that kind of vulnerable honesty to cut him to shreds. He must have trusted her, believed that she’d changed enough.

She’d come to the thought that his making that offer meant he only wanted to see her happy. Idiot didn’t understand that it was him, that she couldn’t want anyone else the way she did him. But it wasn’t like this was worse than she’d had before. She was used to being not wanted in the way she hoped. At least he wanted her, cared deeply, even if not in bed. She wasn’t a little girl living in a fairy tale where it all turned out perfect. What he gave was better than anything she’d had before. If this was the sort of love he could give, best friend rather than lover, she’d take it, and be grateful that someone saw her truly and didn’t turn away.

Besides, maybe he was onto something with his writing off sex. Wasn’t like it had ever done much for her anyway—she’d never had some fucking transcendent, spiritual experience like everyone went on and on about. At its best, for her it was a few minutes of forgetting things or tasting power, rarely topping it off with a joyless orgasm that was mostly about vindication. A few minutes of flying high, and then the crash left her needing to go do it again, getting emptier and angrier all the time. No need to screw anyone else, then or now. She was better off taking care of her own needs when they cropped up: less complicated and without pretensions. And guiltily she admitted she’d have to try her best to not imagine him when she did it, like she had last night. 

Just as the darkness grew all-encompassing, the watch sent up an alert, and after weeks on the warpath, the forcefield transition was smooth. It was down for a few moments and then immediately put back into place with a crackling hum of neon blue energy that rapidly dissipated.

The messenger—Calypso, that was her name—panted and wheezed as she stood there in the firelight, doubled over and bobbling slightly back and forth from side to side as if she was drunk. But the mud spatters all over her, and her exhausted state, spoke loud and clear. Johanna reached her first, well aware of Haymitch and Boggs just a few feet behind, hearing the voices asking for an explanation. “Get her some water,” she said, as Calypso sat down heavily on the ground.

“Horse—broke leg. Ran,” she wheezed, as someone pushed a canteen towards her, eyes closed and body still shuddering with the sheer effort of breathing. 

Johanna stared at her, amazed. “Shit,” she said, because there didn’t seem to be much else that suited.

It took a while for Calypso to gulp down the water and catch her breath, but in the end, she had good news. Victors’ Bayou had joined their alliance without a shot fired.

“Obviously they waited to see the way the wind was blowing before they’d run with it,” Annie murmured, a pleased expression on her face. Johanna was less inclined to give credit to that kind of tactic, but she’d learned enough to hold her tongue. This wasn’t her home, not her people. If their Career minds embraced doing everything possible to ensure survival above all, she’d be stupid to piss all over it and tell them they joined only on her terms, her notion of honor, or not at all.

Though she did ask Finnick, on the quiet, “And if the wind starts to blow the other way, are your buddies going to leave us wandering?”

Head bowed slightly, she couldn’t see his face to read his expression. “They’re committed now,” he said finally, voice almost unnaturally calm, hiding whatever surge of emotion he must have been feeling about all of it. She tried to not think about how personal it would be once they finally managed to tackle Seven, marching towards the winter town to help make her district free. “This unites all of Four against the Capitol. People aren’t stupid enough to believe there’ll be mercy even if they backstab you. They’ll either sink or swim along with the rebellion.” 

They’d already decided a formal surrender wasn’t in the cards—too humiliating, when they needed to welcome allies. So when they rode into the square in front of the Justice Building, another grey winter morning with the sun barely peeking from behind the clouds in brief glimpses, it was with a casual air rather than with the bristling intent of conquerors. Annie and Finnick and the rest of the Four contingent of their little army rather pointedly led the way. “Love the redecorating choice,” Haymitch quipped, pointing towards where a banner hung from the second floor balcony over the wooden stage.

She looked, surprised, because her eye had passed right over it as normal. The red ground of the banner was the same bright crimson, but the golden bird depicted wasn’t the Capitol eagle. It was crudely painted, but the phoenix symbol looked like the she’d worn on that first stupid, gaudy armband all the way back in Nine, long since worn to tatters, was there—stylized and simplified to clean, stark lines, but unmistakable. She looked at it and she smiled, unable to help it, enjoying the spectacle. She hadn’t really thought about it, but taking their cherished symbol of authority and subverting it like this felt like a blatant _fuck you_ to the Capitol.

Old Mayor Solange, who’d probably been in charge even since before Haymitch’s Games, let alone hers, waited at the foot of the steps, bent and gnarled in a way that reminded her of Mags—the sharp intensity of those muddy hazel eyes didn’t much hurt either. As she reined in the horse, well aware that Castor and Pollux probably had the damn camera rolling even now, Solange glanced up, and before she could even dismount, he had only seven words for her. “Y’all think you’ll actually win this war?”

The old Johanna would have seen herself in it and thought it was sarcastic mockery of an enemy in the face of humiliation. She managed to stuff down that impulse and look deeper, because there was a gleam there in those eyes, a determination. He’d led Four for decades, become as integral to it as Mags had been to Four’s victors. If Victors’ Bayou had given in so easily, it must have been in part because of this man’s efforts. That told her plenty about his sympathies. Four might play the shrewd long-term game rather than giving way to passionate conviction come hell or high water, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have their opinions one way or another. _You gonna finish what you started, girl?_ that look asked her.

“Yep,” she answered him laconically, pleased to see the smile that split that seamed, weather-beaten old face. “You think we can count on Four in this?”

A slight nod that wasn’t an answer so much as a respectful acknowledgment of a genuine question rather than her just rubbing his face in things. “Not been an easy year here, _fille_ , all the shortages and hard time making quota. So there’s plenty of pissed off folk, just had too much still to lose to play that hand too early. Anyway, we’re in it now well and good, so we’ll fight.” 

“Good enough,” she acknowledged. She’d rather people came to this with their eyes wide open anyway. She’d had enough of blind fanatics.

Of course, the inevitable propo came next—the public had to be treated to their glorious victory as District Four joined the rebellion. They’d of course underplayed the pockets of resistance, making it seem like Four had walked right into the rebel camp like an eager lover, greeting their raiders as liberators. She suspected being thoroughly painted with rebel red like that in public opinion had helped sway Four’s fate in the end, though maybe it had only pushed them towards where they wanted to go. The Capitol had taken their loyalty for granted this last winter, by what Finnick had told her during the training sessions before the Quell. 

They'd insisted she and Haymitch ditch the body armor. Wouldn't do to look wary and geared up in a district that supposedly had joined them eagerly. Admittedly, it was a relief to strip off the weight of it. Setting up in the town square, Cressida bemoaned the weather that day, glancing skyward and sighing, “Overcast, windy—could we have a glummer atmosphere for what should be a victory celebration?”

She didn’t reply right away, watching Finnick and Annie walk through the empty square to stand on the stage, where countless Reaping Days had happened including their own Games, where Mags had sacrificed herself for Annie five months before, and where their families had died while Annie was on their hovercraft to Thirteen and Finnick was captive on the Capitol’s one. She couldn’t help but watch Finnick’s face. There was a terrible mix of grief and guilt there, but a towering steely rage overrode it all, as if the weight of everything he’d lost, the Capitol’s golden idol who’d suffered deeply but still been sheltered from some harder realities, had finally hit home. It was a look so unfamiliar on easygoing Finnick, turned his face into something ugly and twisted, and she looked away as she saw Annie reaching for Finnick’s hand. It was only to give him his privacy, since Annie loving Finnick couldn’t hurt her anymore. If anything, now she was genuinely glad her friend had someone to stand by him after everything he’d been through.

The sight of him like that plucked at her nerves, so of course she gave her words and irritated edge. “It’s winter, Cress,” jamming her hands in her jacket pockets, “and the Capitol may have controlled everything in Panem, but even they don’t control the weather.” She couldn’t resist adding the final, black-humored quip, “Except when they’re cramming people into an arena, of course.” Funny how easy everyone seemed to forget the horror of the arenas with the war on. She never could, and winter was almost a comfort, because it was nothing like the Quell and its unbearable heat. 

For one instant, it was all boring business as usual, waiting for the cameras, mind already turning to the next challenge ahead. Seven would be next, it had to be. Everyone who hadn’t managed to win their freedom out at the lumber camps during the summer and autumn months would be gathered all down in the winter town, and the reports were that it was about two thirds of the district. Surely the Capitol had let down its guard a bit by now, figuring it was too cold, too miserable, for the rebels to risk an assault that far north, that Johanna’s passion for her home district had faded that she hadn’t gotten them to break Seven free first and foremost. 

Though it weighed on her some nights to think of Seven still under the harsh weight of the Capitol, hoping the punishment didn’t fall all the harder for her sake. Wondering too if they believed she’d forsaken them that other districts had been freed first, that allies hadn’t magically appeared right when they started to fight back. It was the first time in a good eight years she’d genuinely worried what the people of her district thought of her, given how defiantly she’d written them off in her own mind and heart long ago. The act of an angry and hurt child; she could admit now, bound to others again, that the rootlessness had hurt like hell.

Distracted, at first she wasn’t sure what the sound was—had one of those trucks on the street backfired? Then it came again, and again, and her mind identified the sound of gunshots right there was a sharp sting in her chest, the feeling like she’d been punched. She didn’t fall to the ground so much as she was slammed there forcefully by Haymitch as he growled, “Get down,” tackling her down with his body covering hers.

Wind knocked out of her, body protesting being smashed into the solid and chilly cobblestones of the square, that wasn’t the worst. The worst was lying there, pinned beneath the solid bulk of a bigger, stronger male body, smelling his sweat, feeling that hot breath on her cheek and the twitches of his body against her, hearing his panting. The part of her that had dared to fantasize a bit about Haymitch abruptly went dark, and the horrible reality took over, expanding and filling her mind.

Her hand flailed out to the side—the axe was there, it had to be there, she’d seen Clark drop it when he wrestled her to the ground. But it wasn’t there this time. There was nothing but the hard, unforgiving stones of the courtyard where he’d found her by the fountain. None of them were loose enough to grab, either.

She said “No”, throat so tight with fear that her scream emerged as more of a whisper, and waiting for his hand to clamp down over her mouth and stifle her cries and protests. It was going to happen this time. “Get off me,” even as it had to be useless, hating herself for begging. She couldn’t breathe.

But a miracle happened. Her flailing and shoving at him with all her might somehow worked—had terror given her additional strength to equal his? There was just enough space for her to get away. As she scrambled out from underneath him, coughing, her lungs burning with the effort to catch her breath and spattering blood on the stones as she coughed—she must have bit her cheek in the struggle—she looked for a weapon, saw the knife he wore on his belt.

As she reached for it, now she noticed something off. Curled in tightly around himself, groaning softly, he bled already, though she hadn’t touched him. His jacket was already soaked through with red around his right flank, the color of it wetly staining the grey fabric a dark purple-black like nightlock, and there was another splotch of bright color on his right shoulder. She stared in confusion. How had she wounded him? The axe wasn’t in her hand. It was still on her belt when she reached down to touch it, reassuring herself. But no question he was bleeding, badly wounded. “Are you…bleeding?” she asked stupidly.

Then she started to notice more details. Grey jacket—he ought to have been wearing a Five tribute’s dusky purple. His hair—it was a riot of glossy black curls, not Clark’s dirty blond hair, stick-straight, lank and oily from days without washing. He wasn’t a stringy teenager either, instead having a man’s sturdy, solid build.

The mounting evidence of things that didn’t fit now ruptured through the walls of the past that had closed around her again. As she looked hastily around, trying to gather her wits, she saw someone pinned by the arms of several other men nearby, a bright flash of bronze hair and the twisted, furious, teeth-baring expression, eyes wild—Finnick? But she couldn’t think about that right now, couldn’t make any sense of it, dazed as she was. She’d been shot, because her pain-racked breathing told her that. He’d been shot trying to protect her. 

Her drop to the stones beside him was more of a graceless collapse than anything. But she reached out and found his hand. Whether all that blood was his or hers didn’t seem to matter. Nobody had ever thought she was worth it; stupid man, trying to take a bullet for her. “Why?” she managed to wheeze the single word through the blood and the pain.

She must have looked like a nightmare as she leaned over him, bleeding from the mouth like Snow. But his eyes slid half-open and he looked up at her. There was that infuriating wry half-smile on his lips, as if he was sitting on a couch with not a care in the world rather than bleeding out from getting gut-shot. He managed each word in a ragged gasp. “Peeta’s…a real…bad…influence.”

What did that even mean? She shook her head, not able to deal with his messages within messages right now. Her brain was too exhausted. And he closed his eyes and didn’t say anything more. But his fingers still gripped hers, stronger than she’d have imagined, but she clutched him equally hard, afraid to let go even a little. “Stop dying,” she pleaded with him. When she left people, that was when they told her they’d died, even if that had been Capitol, lies, but if she stayed with him, obviously Haymitch couldn’t die.

She stayed there, holding his hand in hers, going number and more tired, for a minute or an hour. Finally the medics came, and she wouldn’t let him go even then, as they barked orders that became a harsh buzz in her ears. With another small sting of pain in her arm, the blackness of oblivion came over her.


	36. Chapter 36

He opened his eyes to the sight of grey overhead, flat and unrelieved, so dull and barren that he had to shut his eyes again. It was nothing as natural as an overcast sky—that at least would have some shading and shadow to it. Fuzzy as his mind felt, he managed to fish out the notion: _I’m back in District Thirteen?_ Besides, the searing, red-hot pulse of pain in his side and his shoulder told him that he couldn’t be dead. Being dead meant nothing hurt, and it wasn’t that he had a low pain tolerance, given he’d successfully gritted his teeth through flogging and rough fucking and being sliced up by a patron and being practically eviscerated on camera, but right now it was all he could do to not scream.

As was, he choked out a breath that held the underpinning of a sob to it. Maybe this was the Capitol. They’d caught him and they were torturing him.

The physical pain snagged onto the other, more hidden hurts. The long-suppressed images of Katniss, screaming in pain and terror and trying to scrabble away before the mutt lunged, and then so still on that morgue table. The thought of Perulla, Hazelle, and Maribelle, kneeling down on the same weathered boards of the stage where he had stood for so many, too many, summers as others were condemned to die, and then collapsing in a heap of limp rag-doll limbs, facedown into a halo spray of blood and brains. Peeta’s now-matching leg stumps, his wasted body, and the empty, lost look he still sometimes had in his eyes as he struggled with something far more devastating than the loss of another limb. Apollonia—Briar—bloodstained and dying, fighting like a lioness for the tattered remnants of her kin, the family she’d so desperately wanted, struggling to stay alive long enough to beg him to look after them. Madge, hiding it all behind a cool façade, just as Maysilee had, but he’d seen the shadow of taking lives there in her eyes. Vick, crying in the bathroom where he thought nobody would see, and bravely trying to pretend he’d be all right. Posy, alternately rejecting him and clinging to him, obviously still not certain to make of the man who’d stepped into the shoes of the father who’d never even seen her face. Lindy, sometimes still bursting into tears, nearly inconsolable, too young to even make sense of a fine and safe world, let alone a world so full of pain and loss and uncertainty.

But the timbers of those images creaked dangerously, unable to hold back the weight of the truly unbearable. The last things that happened before he lost consciousness caved in on him—they buried and smothered him. The incredible image of Finnick, pistol raised in his one hand, stalking towards Johanna with his intent clear, his face a twisted mask of fury and determination, bared teeth and glittering eyes. A victor didn’t screw around. Blooded as they already were, they wouldn’t attack like that unless it was to kill. He’d seen Finnick obsessively practicing at the shooting range, but the idea of Finnick trying to kill Johanna, trying to kill him, couldn’t be withstood. The betrayal, the confusion, was so overwhelming. He rarely got caught flatfooted by a situation to the point where he couldn’t even start to spot a potential way out of it, but it was like he’d been dropped right in his tracks. His friend had tried to murder him, had lied glibly all these weeks and pretended like nothing was wrong. 

And then there was the worst of it: Johanna. She’d been underneath him, all right, but she hadn’t looked at him with love and laughter. He couldn’t forget the image of her face: her eyes wide with fury and hatred, her hands shoving frantically at him with all her strength, her harsh breaths in his ear as she tried to scream for him to get off her. His silly little daydream turned into a nightmare, should have figured. He wasn’t meant for anything kind or gentle or loving. He’d deluded himself thinking he’d somehow become someone better, that maybe he could deserve to hope. 

The final defense of fretting about that gave way to the deepest fear, shattering like a pane of glass. It didn’t even really matter if she couldn’t bear him that close to her, that she was disgusted, so long as she was still alive. She had to be alive. He couldn’t imagine it otherwise. Couldn’t believe that he’d flung himself headlong at her at the first shot, quickly realizing he wouldn’t be able to tackle Finnick, taken at least one hit aimed at her, and somehow failed to save her. Another image flashed into his mind. Johanna, with blood around her mouth and trickling down her chin: shot, or just bitten her lip when he slammed her down to the ground? Johanna, looking like Snow. He shuddered at that, because it was as bad an image as her looking at him with such rage and loathing. 

There was something—something else he tried to remember, something important about all of it—but it didn’t come to him. It was like trying to grasp smoke. 

The world couldn’t be that cruel as to let her die, with her last moments full of loathing for her fake husband and fatal betrayal from her best friend, and make him survive it all, could it? Oh, yes it could. How many people had he failed to save already, good people, while he tenaciously clung to life like some fucking vermin? Of course he’d survive this. 

But Finnick had lied, maybe lied for far, far longer than a few weeks—he was Career, betrayal was in his very nature, wasn’t it? Skilled liar, maybe he’d been playing the long game all along. Maybe Johanna had lied all this time too, pretended that she’d given a damn, chuckling all the while at a silly, miserable middle-aged drunk, laughing even more lately as he confided his pathetic failures and secrets to her. She’d acted for the cameras. Of course she could have acted for him. Why would it ever have been anything real? He shouldn’t have ever imagined better, and loving a woman who apparently hated him seemed appropriate enough for his life. 

He hissed through his teeth, swallowing back the swell of misery, willing himself not to start bawling like a little boy. Through the red haze, he heard someone say, “…awake yet!” There was a fresh sting of pain in his arm, burning through his veins. Nothing made sense, and everything hurt. But then the blackness descended again and he gratefully gave way to it, to the blissful defense of feeling nothing rather than facing this new world where he’d once again lost everything that made sense. 

When he woke up again, the red haze was gone. His entire body still screamed in protest, but the fire of it now centered in the lower left side of his abdomen and his left shoulder. Between that and the slight feeling of thick-headedness it felt like the time he’d gotten stung by a tracker jacket as a kid—he’d managed to hide in the river to escape the rest of them, and Burt Everdeen had helped guide him home. He’d missed school the next day for “flu”.

But it couldn’t be then. The ceiling overhead wasn’t the boards of their house in the Seam, darkened with age. Plus the throbbing pain was roughly in the area of the wound the Capitol had repaired, the scar they stole from him to pretend as if those Games and that terror and suffering had never been. But his shoulder wasn’t wounded then, and it hurt in a far worse, deep pain, as if the knife hadn’t just sliced cleanly into his guts, but twisted around viciously while it was in there, causing a wider and deeper path of destruction.

Confused, caught between the mingled sensations from age eleven and sixteen and the thought that both of those had long since receded into the past, he pushed himself up onto his elbows, turning his aching head to look around. His side and shoulder flared with pain as the motion pulled at the wounds. He saw the grey sheets, the stark steel walls, and people bustling around in their grey scrubs. 

He dropped his head back, panting with that simple effort. _Oh. This is District Thirteen._ Hadn’t he thought that very same thing before? It was all a muddle.

“Oh, you’re awake again!” a nasal voice said, and he heard footsteps approaching. _Again?_ “Time for another morphling dose. Wait right here, don’t move.”

“Don’t have…much choice on that,” he managed. But now that he’d remembered, he had to look frantically, hoping to see Johanna. The last memory he had was her leaning over him, a shadow blocking out the glum early winter sun, one with a mouth painted with crimson. The Capitol whore-makers had made her wear bright red lipstick—her and Enobaria both—to make people readily think of blood and both women’s vicious reputation. But it wasn’t lipstick. He’d watched the blood trickling down her chin too, heard the crackling gasp to her words as she told him to stop dying. As if he had a choice in it.

He saw her in the next bed over now, sheets pulled up to her chest, a wan and still figure, eyes closed. The stillest he’d ever seen Johanna Mason, really, with her arms neatly at her side, legs side-by-side and stretched out straight. But her chest steadily rose and fell in a strong motion as he watched. He lay back down, relieved—yes, she was alive, and for a wonder, so was he. 

She’d held his hand until he was too weak to stay awake and the grey fog descended over his vision; she’d told him not to go. Something stirred in the back of his mind there—that was an important detail.

For so many years that would have been the very best he could expect: someone to care enough from simple human kindness to be there while he died, and maybe, if they were particularly forgiving, to hold his hand. His world had contracted into one of solitude punctuated by the annual summer horrors, and that eventually hardened, stuck inside the shell of a cramped and dark existence that he’d shrunk to fit until he’d given up all hope of anything outside of it.

Even Katniss and Peeta hadn’t challenged that head-on—sure, they’d put a few dents and chips in it, maybe a small crack. But it was always clear that he was their mentor, the man they relied upon to help them get through situations. Nothing too personal, no promises of anything, and well, he’d never pretended that they actually liked him. Katniss had always made her dislike obvious. But even Peeta’s high-handedness when the card was read had startled him. The boy’s scalding contempt, the accusations of uselessness, felt like betrayal.

He liked to think that they would have cared for him when he was old and dying, which was more than he’d have had before, but he held no illusions that it wouldn’t be in large part due to a long-standing debt finally paid. They’d simply needed him, tolerated him out of goodness or pity or whatever. It had finally changed now with Peeta, maybe it would have changed with Katniss in time, but that was what it had been, and maybe he couldn’t have accepted anything more than that anyway.

His last ally—his last friend who’d fought by his side—had died in the arena as he held her hand, and Maysilee had tried to abandon him earlier simply so they wouldn’t have to murder each other. She’d walked away, because he couldn’t. He’d never had anyone since he was a child who couldn’t be taken from him in the end by the greedy, grasping claws of the Capitol. Too many of them could be killed. Even his fellow victors, long before they became murder-bait again in the Quell, weren’t his to fully trust. Even as they drank, laughed, gave him the only human warmth and support that he could yet claim in the world, they all would have schemed to place yet another knife wound in him by targeting his latest batch of tributes. 

At the end of it all, if it had been a Twelve tribute and any other district in the Games, they’d have willingly cut him again because their obligations to their district outweighed even friendship. He’d wielded that knife himself in the 74th against the Career mentors to save Katniss and Peeta, had lied and betrayed friends. That was the way it was, and none of them blamed each other for it. It was friendship, perhaps even family, but even those bonds had their limits of trust. They all had people and obligations that mattered more than him. Katniss and Peeta had been just the same.  
He could lie to himself and pretend that Johanna only said it because she was afraid to be left alone. And Finnick—he couldn’t even think of Finnick right now, because the thing made no fucking sense.

Thinking of Finnick’s enraged face, the memory of Johanna looking at him with hatred rose to mind too. He flinched at that. But no, it had to be different. Once he’d used the last of his strength to push up enough to let her out from under him, that look stopped. She’d stayed by him. That had to matter more, didn’t it? There was something nagging at the back of his mind again, but he couldn’t remember it and thus grasp the piece that would make sense of it all. 

Finnick’s deadly betrayal, Johanna’s utter fury followed by that unexpected gift of tenderness: he was so damn tired, too tired. The nurse injected the morphling into the IV stuck in the back of his hand, and he gratefully slipped back into sleep, trusting it would be dreamless. 

He opened his eyes, seeing the grey ceiling, feeling the dull throb of pain like the morning-after ache of sore muscles worked too hard. _District Thirteen._ He’d opened his eyes to that sight before, had that exact realization before. His brain still felt like he had during the thick of the Games last year, catching only broken minutes of sleep here and there, but it was coming back to him now. 

But before he could dig into all of it and mine the whole slag heap for what nuggets of useful information were there, he heard the words, “You up?” A husky thread of a voice, robbed of most of its power, but he’d know her anywhere.

“Yeah,” he said, hearing the rasp of his voice, his tongue feeling thick and dry.   
He pushed up from the mattress and halfway turned over to look at her, feeling the twinge of the wounds as the motion pulled on them. It ached, and he suppressed a wince, but not nearly as bad as the searing stab of pain he’d have expected given how badly he’d been injured. Dying—he’d been dying. No sense mincing words. It was far worse than his arena wounds from years ago, and not just the difference of twenty-five years. After Sapphire’s would-be death blow, he’d still managed to run at least a quarter mile, uphill part of the way, with his fingers clasped over his bulging intestines before the shock overwhelmed him. This time, if he hadn’t tackled Johanna down to the ground, he’d have been down for the count within seconds anyway. 

The difference between having his intestines sliced into by a knife and pulverized by a bullet. He suppressed a groan as he remembered days of eating pudding and soup and applesauce and the like until his guts could handle solid food again. They’d finally cleared him for that when they sent him home to Twelve. That meal his ma had planned the night the house burned, rabbit stew and white-flour biscuits and blueberry slump, would have been one of the first real meals he’d eaten. 

He turned his mind away from the past sharply. No sense dwelling there when there was plenty in the present that needed tending. He’d been wounded badly, should have been fatal if not for someone presumably getting right to tending it. For wounds that bad, obviously Thirteen must have used rapid healing on him.

He looked her over. She looked tired, hair a tangled rat’s nest, an ashy pallor to her golden skin that made her look almost like she was from Three. But she was alive, and those eyes still had as much life to them as ever as she looked back at him. “You OK?” he asked.

He didn’t mean just about her wounds—the image of her looking up at him, terrified, intruded in his mind, unwanted but undeniable. He could imagine why. The Five boy, her Games, she must have flashed back to that as she tried to fight him off. It hadn’t been him, but at the same time, it had, because it had been something he’d done that triggered off that reaction. So he couldn’t help the stab of guilty regret that he, of all people, would have called back that hurt and fear. 

“Getting there,” she replied, settling again on an elbow, wincing slightly. “Gonna have a new scar for the collection. Thirteen doesn’t go in for cosmetic erasure, and since it’s not on my face…”

He laughed, actually only choked out a single huff of laughter before his abused abdomen told him it was a bad idea. “War wound. It’ll make you look dangerous and heroic, you know. “

She scoffed softly at that. “Guess that makes you look twice as good, two bullets and all.”

“Oh, me? Wasn’t like there was much in the way of good looks to wreck anyway.” Glib words, but he’d known how little his body meant to anyone when Snow handed him over to Thalius that last time, no Remake scheduled. Washed-up old drunk, nothing to look at—good thing he’d been well pickled watching most Reaping recaps and the like after that, because the sight of him would have provoked disgust in himself along with everyone else. He’d loathed looking in the mirror. “Though hey, if it’s anything like the last time I got a gut wound, maybe I’ll drop a few pounds.” He’d lost weight in the arena, of course, and then the inability to eat anything substantial for days on end—they’d had to do a hell of a lot of makeup for his victor interview to hide his hollow cheeks. 

Her eyes narrowed suddenly, sending warning that her temper was up. Even husky as it was, she could still force some volume into that voice, and she did, somehow shouting in a near-whisper. “Let’s cut the bullsh—” She doubled up at that, coughing, over and over, deep choking hacks. The fingers of her one hand clutched the pillow, knotted in it, and the other clapped over her mouth. When she finally stopped coughing, gasping for breath, he could see the small freckles of blood on her fingers. 

Looking down the row, he didn’t see any of the doctors or nurses. They’d been put in the recovery section, away from the critical patients. Nobody responded to Johanna’s coughs, so they probably were in between the half-hourly rounds of the medics too. All the staff must have been at other beds, checking in on other patients. Glancing at the nightstand between their beds, he saw the pitcher of water there, and knew from having done his rounds that they’d have some clean cloths in the drawer, sanitized rags gleaned from the worn-out clothes, sheets, and towels condemned beyond repair during their last trip through the laundry.

Pushing up from the bed hurt, pulling at those deep aches, and he felt weak as a newborn, swaying a little just trying to stay upright. His head swam with the effort and he slapped a hand down on the nightstand to support himself. But he managed to open the drawer enough to grab a cloth, and managed to splash some water from the pitcher on it before his unsteady legs gave out and he collapsed down to her bed, sitting heavily on the edge. It was as much luck as anything that he didn’t miss and hit the floor, or sit on her. Breathing in deeply, he waited until his head stopped spinning. “Here,” he said, turning to offer her the damp cloth. She’d want to do it herself.

“Taking care of me, huh?” she muttered, taking it, and wiping off her hand and then her lips. “I’ve got parents, you know. Again.” 

He heard the warning in that—keep his distance. Funny thing how that hurt more than his body, but he wouldn’t let that show. “Sure,” he answered, reaching a hand out to try and push himself up off the nightstand again.

“Dammit.” He felt her hand on his upper arm, grabbing on tightly. He couldn’t help it, his body tensing, remembering some early patrons who’d enjoyed manhandling. She must have realized it because her grip eased, but she didn’t let go. Her voice was quiet with more than being physically robbed of its power by lung injury. It sounded small, almost scared as she asked, “Do we have to keep doing this pretending bullshit…even after what happened? You didn’t jump in to take two bullets because I’m the Phoenix, or because I’m your friend, did you?”

He took that in, feeling terrifyingly naked at how easily she’d read him. But she was right. Continued denial, after the honesty of those few stark moments back in Four when they were both on the cusp of dying, seemed sort of ridiculous. He hadn’t told her openly he loved her, and maybe it was a bit of fear on his part, but mostly not wanting to burden her with the sorrow of love never fully realized. He’d been through all that with Briar, and being the one left behind in the ashes was unbearable. 

He’d veiled his words even then, as she did now. He tried to think it over, looking as ever for what she really said. Easier to pick up on the words of hurt and loneliness and guilt that they’d shared all these years. But different dialect though it might have been, he still spoke her language. _Taking care of me, huh…I’ve got parents. Do we have to keep doing this pretending bullshit, even after what happened?_

Certainty dawned on him, and that was even more frightening than the vulnerability, because it changed everything. Chantilly had asked him, point-blank, what he’d do if she loved him back and demanded more of him than distant adoration. She must have sensed this moment would come someday and tried, in true Career fashion, to help make him ready for it. A crossroads, but as he looked it over, there was only one choice he could make. He was tired of hiding and half-truths and solitude, safe as it might be. So he had to try to become the man she deserved, no matter what the struggle. “And you didn’t stay there and hold my hand because I’m the one who handles the brass for you, or because you’re my friend.”

He had to look at her now. He turned, and wasn’t surprised to see her looking at him. The flicker of fear on her face, alongside the vulnerability of hope, making her look strangely soft and young, was oddly reassuring—she felt what he felt. This time she reached for his hand, fingers lacing through his. His breath caught at that. Such a little thing, to be touched kindly in a way that had nothing to do with sex or emotional desperation, but he’d been denied that for so long it meant so much. 

They hadn’t had to act like horny teenagers in their propos, given that they were both older and that there was a war on. Plutarch had called for them to present a “dignified” wartime romance, the image of their being completely supportive partners rather than lustfully passionate lovers. That made the job a hell of a lot easier. Not much pretending to be done. So they hadn’t really had to touch, and there were no cameras here anyway, no excuse for her to touch him now except her own wanting. “What the hell are we gonna do?” he murmured, shaking his head. After all the wariness and anxiety, everything seemed so amazingly serene now, the pressure relieved. She loved him. He suspected the full force of that would hit him later, when he could withstand it better, but right now he’d take this spot of light after all the long, bitter darkness. 

She looked at him, calm certainty in those eyes now. “Don’t know,” she admitted. “But…we’ll figure it out.” She made that little _hrmph_ that he knew meant she was out of sorts in some way, trying to figure out how to say something.

“Yeah?” he coaxed.

“Does this mean that you want to sleep with me?” she blurted.

He noticed she didn’t say _fuck_. Scrambling for a reply, the first thing from his lips was breezy, joking. “Hell, not right now, darlin’. Either of us might pass out in the middle, and then what will the infirmary staff say?” She glared at him, brows knitted down over a distinct scowl, her entire face with those wide brown eyes looking suddenly hawkish. He couldn’t help grinning at that success, enjoying that even in loving him, that fierce Johanna wasn’t gone by the wayside by any means. 

But then she grinned in return. “Eh, men pass out right after anyway,” she said with a shrug, and he rewarded that quick rejoinder with a low chuckle, as much as he could manage.

Given those few extra seconds to recover, he tried to be honest about it. Funny thing, how he felt like he could say almost anything right now and not fear her ridicule or judgment, and that must have been simple trust. “It’s…the wanting about the whole business isn’t there for me, but wanting _you_ …I mean…it’s changed lately, but when I imagine anything at all, it’s you I think about, not fuc—sex, and does that even make any damn sense?” Wonderful, apparently he’d reverted to an inarticulate teenager. At least his voice wasn’t cracking and his cock wasn’t standing up constantly to the point of embarrassment. But he willed himself to not look away from her, kept holding onto her hand.

“I think so.” Was that a faint flush of color creeping into those strain-paled cheeks? “Because I thought about you, what you’d be like. While I was…taking care of myself,” she said defiantly, and the look she gave him, half-challenge and half-invitation, was pure Johanna. 

The sudden vivid mental image of Johanna, naked and touching herself, especially while imagining him, brought his brain crashing to a full stop. If his body hadn’t been presently beat all to hell, he had the feeling his cock would have very helpfully announced its presence, because pretty much only a dead man could have failed to rouse at that notion. Realizing from the flicker of panic on his face he’d better say something, he managed to untie his tongue. “Now, I wouldn’t mind seeing that.” He was surprised it wasn’t just concealing banter, not a sly, idle remark like it would have been with any of his patrons—he’d used that tactic more than a few times. It kept their hands off him a while longer, and his hands off them. If he was really lucky, they enjoyed the subtle domination of being ordered, in step-by-step detail, to fuck themselves enough that his clothes stayed on and he never came closer to them than sitting in a nearby chair issuing commands. 

But here, with her, he actually meant it, and that was a fresh surprise. Her eyes widened, obviously stunned, and he instinctively cringed, ready to take it back. “Wouldn’t mind seeing that from you either,” she answered.

Body beat all to hell or not, his pulse shot upwards a bit at that declaration, though it was as much shock as arousal. It was one thing to imagine she loved him so she’d put up with the middle-aged, scarred body that came with the deal, but another task entirely to wrap his brain around the notion of her actually finding him in any way attractive. Even now that voice in his mind tried to remind him, _You’re nothing, you know._ Somehow it didn’t do as much for him to think about her watching him touch himself, but it wasn’t the idea of embarrassment so much as a curious absence of enjoyment—yeah, orgasm was a feel-good sensation, but the Capitol fucked that all up by making his body helplessly respond when a patron forced him. He didn’t trust physical sensation. But then he imagined her sitting there, eyes alight with interest and desire, imagining her pleasure at the sight—that filled in the missing gap. 

They stared at each other for a few long moments after that, the look on her face mirroring his feeling of being surprised as hell but also somehow deeply pleased. That wolfish grin of hers came back. ”Didn’t know there was still a naughty man inside you just waiting to get out, Haymitch.”

Fully dressed and holding hands as innocent as two little pre-reaping kids, but talking dirty as anything, and damn if he wasn’t _enjoying_ it a bit. “Want a naughty man inside you?” he returned immediately, giving her an answering smile.

Her expression sobered, the grin relaxing, but not fading away entirely. The smile she gave him was softer, a bright dawn rather than blazing midday, and the private tenderness of it pulled at him in an entirely different, deeper way than her roguish humor. It was an expression he’d seen on her lately sometimes, often around the kids or her parents, and though he couldn’t have pictured it on her six months ago, it suited easily. “Someday.”

“Someday,” he agreed, understanding it was a tacit promise made between the two of them. They wanted to make this thing between them, spun from necessity and Capitol and Thirteen lies, into something real. He wanted it so much it scared the hell out of him, because he’d learned how to not want anything. But he’d almost lost her in Four. He could hide from it for the rest of his life, or embrace what they could have, even if it brought all the possibility of loss and pain. “But not yet. I don’t want it to be us just getting through it.” The memory of her terror at his weight pressing down on her was too sharp, and the thought of her hands on him, accepting that and giving himself over to her so utterly, still was too much for him. “I want it to be good for you.” 

He didn’t mean just in terms of making her come. They both knew how to make it physically good. But she’d never even been kissed before she went into that arena, and nearly got raped. She gave her first kiss and her virginity both that next summer to a coolly distant stranger out of pure self-preservation. If she’d been kissed since then, the only thing behind it would have been desperation or possession, not love. She deserved everything she’d never had before, a man who could give her something more intimate than a quick and dirty orgasm, give everything of himself without fear. She deserved so more than a quick fuck simply to prove they could get through it without falling apart. 

It had been so long since he’d touched a woman simply for the affection of it—not since Briar, and he’d let his love of Briar go so long ago. He’d been faithful only to his fear and his guilt, and his mind and heart were so full of Johanna right no they couldn’t gain a foothold. He’d been so alone, so long, and now his world had opened up into something new again, vast and wonderful and alarming all at once, like the wide-open stretches of prairie that went on forever they’d rode together, and he couldn’t bear to be one tiny speck alone in all that vast wilderness. 

So he had to touch her, shaping his free hand to fit the curve of her cheek, cupping her jaw in his hand, hesitating a moment to see if she’d accept it. She leaned slightly into his hand, eyes still on his, steady and intense. He let out a breath he didn’t even realize he’d been holding, feeling a soft shiver work its way down his spine. The way she looked at him while still holding his hand in hers got to him more than any hurried fuck ever could have. 

He could kiss her—only the work of a moment to lean in, brush his lips over hers. But he held back, hesitated. They were both still exhausted and injured, and this was all so painfully new for them both. Too much right now for what that kiss would demand and set in motion. He didn’t want to screw it up by stepping into something they weren’t ready for quite yet. He could kiss her later, but he couldn’t take back a kiss given now without making it an awkward hop backwards.

She rescued him from his indecision. “You’re overthinking again,” she murmured, as she was the one who scooted closer, leaned in towards him, her left hand braced on his shoulder. But she surprised him, because she didn’t kiss him. Instead, she turned her face into his shoulder, nuzzling his neck gently. 

He slipped his arm around her, gathering her in closer, fingers gripping in the soft, worn fabric of her scrubs. Leaned down, brushing his lips across her brow in a kiss he could give, before settling his cheek there. Sitting there, holding her close—it was better than kissing her would have been, he decided. Not _I want your body_ , because they’d both had plenty of people willing to have sex with them, but slowly opening up to all the possibilities of _I know you, I understand you, I accept you. And I want all of you._ He’d been desired, and he’d been needed, but to simply be wanted—too overwhelming an idea and feeling, but in all the best of ways.

~~~~~~~~~~

She’d never had this in her life. Any other times she’d spent sitting on a bed with someone else, it had been the hurried prelude to a quick and meaningless fuck. The quiet serenity of a man’s arms around her, letting herself feel safe and loved—it was almost too much to bear. To simply _be_ , exist in that prolonged moment and accept that gentleness and the journey it began, rather than hurriedly pushing on and slamming the doors on possibilities as she went, scared the hell out of her. She had never been that woman, never had a man who’d wanted to give her that. Someone who’d look at her and even if he didn’t say the words _I love you_ directly, she heard them anyway, and saw it in his eyes, and felt it in his hands.

It wasn’t just love, though. In the end that could be such a cheap, stupid word. People spouted it all the time in Capitol movies—and what did it really mean, anyway? He looked at her like she meant something, like he was proud to be around her. 

She’d never, ever been enough for anyone. The Capitol, who’d utterly rejected that terrified girl on stage in Seven as worthless and deserving of death, and then when she fought back and lived instead of their favorites, they ruthlessly pruned and twisted her story until she became something ugly and terrible in a way that actually made her survival acceptable to them by not challenging their cherished and heroic Games. 

Rhus, stubbornly trying to bridge the distance that had grown between them, trying desperately to reclaim the Johanna he’d realized only too late he cared for, blindly fitting the ghost of that girl over the person who came back from the arena. Finnick, who really had wanted and needed a girl back home who knew him, born of the same sea air and dark cypress forests, who’d be there all the year and help piece him together each summer and understood him instinctively—she’d been a friend and a fuck to help staunch the emotional bleed, but not a true lover. Haymitch as he’d been back then, fucking her kindly but without tenderness, treating her with the nonchalant distance of a responsibility he took on and regarded as a friend, so long as she didn’t challenge his boundaries. 

Seven, not knowing what to make of her, the quiet looks and the veiled comments that she could read like the back of her hand, knowing they wondered if they’d had a monster in their midst all along, and probably wishing their first female victor was anyone else. The Capitol again, making it all too clear that her soul wasn’t enough, now they wanted her life too and measured it as nothing at all against their precious darling Katniss, and they’d readily want her to die just so they could get their stupid “star-crossed lovers” fantasy to continue. Plutarch, Coin, all the rest of them looking at her after Katniss died, the fallback option they scraped together just so all the work of decades wouldn’t be wasted, but making it clear they didn’t really believe in her, only in what image they could make of her and how it would sell. 

This Haymitch gave her something that upended her world. That look he gave her, as he gazed up at her, blood-smeared but strangely calm even as he slipped closer to dying. The look she hadn’t noticed as clearly in the moment, stunned and going into shock herself, but which she’d seen in her restless dreams and her imagination since. The look, that calm softness in his grey eyes, made his cryptic reference to Peeta’s bad influence into something more than him having a witty joke right to the end. _I know you, good and bad, and you’re worth it to me._ He hadn’t been ready to die for the Phoenix, or even for his friend, or even because of his own stupid notions of thinking his life was so worthless.

Whether he was too exhausted to keep up the pretense until the end, or he’d wanted her to know it, it had been there. Maybe he’d known when she pleaded with him to not die, and that gave him the will to show his own cards. At least he hadn’t said it directly. If he’d said _I love you_ right before he died, she wouldn’t have been able to take that final cruelty from the world. She’d managed to keep at least some of the shards of herself glued together despite all the horror and pain, but that tenderness, offered and then snatched away in the same moment, hearing those words and having them forever tainted by death, would have been her undoing.

No pretense left after that, and she’d quickly verbally slapped him out of trying, slipping back into the harness of his old habits. She didn’t know what would happen from here between them, too much to fathom right now, but she wouldn’t be alone heading off into that unknown, struggling to change herself even more. That made it bearable…just.

It was a relief it hadn’t been some mawkish, awkward conversation with over the top declarations. In this, as in many things, they understood a lot without need to say it directly. They’d work on it together, including the whole sex issue. That would take time, but she actually felt relieved to not have to rush into it, that though the old fears held weight, they could joke about it with each other, that the fun in that held the promise of what the sex itself could be like. They’d struck a fine balance there. It would have been far too easy for either of them to snort derisively and say it wasn’t like they were innocents. He’d been whored out on the circuit for close to twenty years, and she’d done her few years there and carried the damage forward, met and fucked her share of men, and women, within hours of meeting them—himself included, all the way back at the beginning. But he didn’t treat her like delicate porcelain either, like he’d just as soon forget all of it and pretend that she was so pure, and she didn’t do it to him either. They couldn’t deny what had happened, but maybe she could start to believe they could become more than their darknesses. 

Not wanting to break the peace of the moment, but able to admit this was the beginning, not the end by any means, now the harder tasks started. She took in a deep breath and immediately regretted it, because her still-tender lungs burned from where she’d been shot, where apparently the lung had collapsed as she started drowning in her own blood. She swallowed down a cough that threatened to burst forth in another flurry of hacking and likely another small spray of blood from irritating the wound. Taking slow, small breaths, she managed to settle it down again. “We probably need to talk to Aurelius, after all this,” she told him, still hanging on to him, not willing to let go just yet. “He did say if the sex thing came up…” Then she thought better—it wasn’t all just about fucking, not with him. She’d looked at him and dreamed of so much more than his body. “It’s not just the sex. We’re…not good at saying things.” They’d both developed the habit of suppressing things, never saying them, misdirecting them into rage or alcohol, because nobody gave a shit. Like kindness, like hope, talking about her fucking _feelings_ was something that had rusted. Aurelius practically had to pull it out of her inch by inch. It worked with Haymitch so far because too often he could read behind her words, but she couldn’t always count on it being that way, could she?

“You think?” he said dryly. In spite of herself, she smiled at that. But then he let out a gruff sigh, his hand on her back tensing and then relaxing. “Yeah, all right, he’s good at getting us to say stuff out that needs to be said. Probably wouldn’t hurt to do some joint sessions about the whole thing in general.” He said it as awkwardly as she had, but his suggesting it told her how deeply it mattered to him that they make it work.

So many questions, so many things she wanted to say, but there would be time for it now. Peaceful as it was, the moment couldn’t hold. She hadn’t seen everything in the confusion and noise, but the image of Finnick screaming and fighting in an almost-animal frenzy as people restrained him was clear as day in her mind, had swum through her thoughts over and over in the haze of half-consciousness. “It was Finn, wasn’t it?” Her fingers tightened around his. “How…”

How could a friend do this to her? How the hell could it make any sense that he’d obviously waited for weeks to pull out that gun and try to shoot her while the cameras rolled? She’d told him about Haymitch, even if she’d held things back because of her own hesitations, and he’d been the same old Finnick, listening and everything. And all the while he’d planned to kill her. It hurt more than the bullet wounds, and it made her shudder with the force of anger and revulsion. Finnick acting Career in a way he never had around here, the glib deceiver and backstabber. Was it something that the Capitol had done to him, or would he have been capable of it even before that, would he have done that to her in the arena? Of course he’d have killed her off to get to go home to Annie, she didn’t doubt it for a minute, but would he have lied? 

Seemed like she could trust nobody if one of her few certain friends was that capable of betrayal. “What the fuck are we going to do?” She shook her head, frustrated, angry tears burning in her eyes, trying to keep the monster in her mind at bay, threatening her swallow her back into that world of paralyzing fear and anxiety, telling her that nothing was safe, nobody was safe. Even as she let Haymitch hold her like this, and talked about marriage therapy, her mind churned and she wondered—wouldn’t she instinctively want to keep a barrier there between them, in case he betrayed her? In that moment she suddenly hated Finnick too, for making her start to doubt even the finest thing she’d ever been given, doubt a man who stood by her and cared about her and made her want to be better, because in his eyes, she was worth it. She hated him for trying to drag her back into that old world where everything was dark and dangerous and cruel.

Haymitch listened, didn’t interrupt her sputtering attempts to get some of it out of her, but when she fell silent again, he shook his head and said, “Look, we don’t know anything more than we did while we were busy bleeding out, and no point getting spun up when we don’t have any more information to help make sense of why he did it.” Another man would likely have pressed a finger to her lips, and she’d have wanted to bristle and bite it off for the condescension of his treating her like a silly child. Or maybe even jokingly clasped his hand over her mouth, and she’d have thought of other hands who’d covered her mouth to silence her, and wanted to scream, or attack, or both. He knew better than that, and after knowing it, he was also better than to do it. “And all right, I’m gonna be selfish here, because we’ve both been so damn miserable for so long, and I don’t think a few hours for us to just be a bit happy for once and not _worry_ about everyone else’s shit is that much to ask.”

Surprisingly, that helped cut through the paralyzing loop of questions and fears and pain that she could easily have drowned in. They’d deal with it, but deal with it together, when they were a bit stronger. But she couldn’t say it that so openly. Seeing him say it so matter-of-factly, without the implied guilt and apology in his words and eyes the way the man from six months ago seemed to have for his mere existence, she could almost have cheered. “Fucking _finally_ you think you’re worth more than sacrificing everything for everyone else, and hey, all it took was almost dying. We’ll tell Aurelius at the next session—he’ll be so proud. Besides,” she added dryly, “might as well enjoy the downtime, since knowing Plutarch and Coin, they’ll come find us soon enough and be all needy.”

“Don’t doubt it for a moment—you don’t imagine they used quick healing resources on us simply from the goodness of their hearts, do you? They obviously don’t want to spend the time on an ‘injured and recovering hero’ angle, so they want us back in action in a hurry. I’d be surprised if they even let the public know we got shot.”  
He was right—she’d had some of the same thoughts, knowing full well how the Thirteen infirmary worked. Quick healing wasn’t in their normal routine. She lifted her head from his shoulder, leaned back, and eyed him. “Not saying you’re wrong, but…like you said, not gonna know anything more until they come tell us. So turn off the scheming and worrying,” she advised him. “A few hours without worrying about everyone else’s shit, right?”

“Can’t help it,” he muttered, a wry, sheepish smile, and the corners of his eyes crinkled with it, making him look years younger. 

“Meh, at least we get out of CPC duty for now.” She grinned at him. “Or is that why they want us healthy so quickly?”

He chuckled softly, but she saw his eyelids drooping and that intense gaze of his gone slightly dreamy-eyed. Obviously he was as tired as she felt, weak as a newborn kitten that simply sitting up and talking to him could exhaust her. True enough that she didn’t have the energy to wrestle with the hard questions right now, especially without the information to do anything except fret about it. She could have joked that guilty angst was more his angle than hers anyway, but held her tongue.

Scooting back over to the other side of the bed, she kept hold of his hand. “C’mere. You look about ready to fall asleep sitting up.” She’d shared a bed with him countless times now, although they’d both taken careful pains to try to not touch each other, to respect distance. If they woke up with an arm or leg flung out in their sleep and touching, no big deal. But this was different now. The hospital bed was smaller than their bed in the compartment, but about the same size as the beds—little more than cots, really—in the CPC rooms, and experience told both of them they could fit together in one for a nap with a bit of space. So if they eliminated that room between them, it would definitely work. 

She’d never slept cozied up to him. Maybe they should have just kept the familiar distance, but she wanted him there, and from how he reached out to her as they lay down, obviously he wanted her there too. It took some adjustment, and she elbowed him in his still-tender side accidentally as she curled up against his side, and his choked bark of pain made her wince. But then it was all right, and it was a different feeling lying there in the crook of his arm, his body too solid and too warm compared to the mattress, and the rise and fall of his chest and the beat of his heart were unfamiliar too.

“Johanna…”

“Hanna,” she murmured sleepily. “Call me Hanna. It’s from back home. People that knew me…cared.” It felt right to tell him that and give him that little intimacy. She couldn’t be little innocent Hanna anymore, but she could reclaim that name and make it her own again. Hanna could be someone different with him, more than angry, bitchy Jo or the Capitol’s nasal mispronunciation: “Joanna”.

She hadn’t let go of his hand the whole time, and he squeezed her fingers sleepily as she heard his breath start to turn to that slow and even rhythm of falling asleep. She closed her eyes, feeling safe and comforted. New, but not bad—she could get used to it.

She opened her eyes to see the craggy features of Phineas Fog looking them over, though he kept a respectful distance. Obviously smart enough to not do something creepy like sit right beside the bed, especially with victors who could turn violent if startled awake. “Company,” she muttered, thick-tongued with sleep, nudging Haymitch with her hand.

Rolling over and sitting up, head aching, she saw Magnolia there as well, and her mom and dad, and tried to not feel weirdly embarrassed they’d caught her asleep with Haymitch. Clothes firmly on, and she was married to him anyway—married people were supposed to sleep together. Still, it felt weird, like they’d seen something she’d rather have kept private between them. Not the best idea to do it in the middle of a public hospital ward, then, and of course they’d be concerned and come to visit. 

“They wouldn’t let us visit until now,” her dad grumbled irritably, scratching idly at his jaw, peppered with stubble. It still felt weird in some ways seeing him without the mustache and beard he’d had while she grew up, but Peacekeepers were clean-shaven, and men in Thirteen had recently had their shaving ration bumped down to once every three days, but it was still expected.

“How long’s it been, anyway?” Haymitch asked, sitting up beside her and rubbing his eyes, clearing his throat.

“Five days,” Magnolia answered him.

“Two days they had you on quick healing along with sedatives—they said you wouldn’t have been able to withstand being awake. Then three days with you sleeping on the morphling to keep you still and healing more,” Petra added. “They say the broken ribs aren’t quite healed yet.” Well, no wonder her chest still ached along with her lungs. “They couldn’t use the best stuff for bone healing alongside the injections to help with the internal damage.”

“I imagine fixing lungs or intestines takes precedence,” Haymitch said dryly.

All four of them stood there awkwardly for a few moments. Gunnar glanced at Petra, and Magnolia kept looking at Haymitch with a look of curious indecision. Suddenly it made sense to Johanna. They cared, they would always care because she’d come to see with the kids that fierce love that told her she’d always be their parent no matter how long she lived. But they hadn’t known exactly how to be around the scared, traumatized no-longer-children they got back from the arena, let alone the adults they’d been away from for years.

“So,” Johanna said, eyeing all of them standing around the bed, “what’s the news?”

They all seemed to relax immediately now that they had something concrete they could do to help, though they all instinctively looked to Phineas. “Finnick’s in isolation, and we’ve been questioning him.” He frowned, golden brown eyes suddenly tired and ancient. “Slow going, very slow. But it’s obvious he’s confused about the reality of a lot of things. Your friends Beetee and Wiress are helping a lot with figuring things out. I’d guess they used tracker jacker venom on him to make him think you two were his enemy. ”

“Like they did Heike and Ash,” she said flatly.

Phineas sighed. “Not quite. With those two, they would have used enough to cause total amnesia. With Finnick, I think they gave him enough to blur reality, make it susceptible to the new picture they painted.”

The silence said everything. Finally, Haymitch was the one who spoke. “And we already know there’s no way to undo it.” They’d had that discussion already about Heike and Ash, had to accept that even if they got them back, the memories were gone. She’d have to accept Finnick was gone, as well? Turned into some twisted creature that had the cunning and malice to lie to her and wait to kill her. She’d almost rather he tried to murder her the moment he stepped off the hovercraft. That would have been more understandable.

Silence, again—they’d all been through enough rough patches to not credit stupid unbelievable lies to make people feel better as worth anything. “We’ll keep looking into it,” Petra said. Blunt, not a sweet, bald-faced lie. “But Coin wants you to stay away from him for now.”

“You might as well give the rest of the bad news,” Johanna told them. “Why do they want us healed up so quickly?”

Gunnar gave a soft, rumbling chuckle and shot her a look that smacked of paternal pride, a familiar expression. “You always were sharp.”

“Nar,” Petra said, shaking her head in irritation. “People don’t know about Finnick and your both being injured. They kept it all very quiet. So Hanna, they want to send you to Seven in three days. Both of you,” she nodded to Haymitch. “Help make one last strike before the worst blizzards hit, and take the winter town.” Her dark whiskey brown eyes narrowed, lips pressed together in a scowl, making it clear she wasn’t happy at the idea.

Johanna nodded, somehow not surprised. “The timing’s right, and it’d look funny if I wasn’t there to help free my home district.” But the idea of going right back into the fight, tired as she was, wanting to look at everyone around her carrying a gun and wonder if they wanted to shoot her—how would she keep it together? Not to mention facing Seven for the first time since it all began. She felt the pressure of Haymitch’s fingers against hers, seeking her hand down by her side, and reflexively squeezed back. That was how, she realized with gratitude. 

“We tried to argue,” Magnolia said lowly, the edge of angry bitterness sharp in her voice.

No, apparently they never stopped being parents. She could have laughed at that. Haymitch spoke up, voice too measuredly calm. “I’m sure Plutarch had some high-flown words about the needed sacrifices by an individual, how the public needs to be sure Johanna’s fine after there was no propo from Four after the victory, and the need to seize a valuable opportunity before we shut down for the winter.”

Phineas gave an amused grunt at that. “You know his rhetoric a little too well. Although that Trinket gal argued that maybe the masses are well-inspired already, and we’re beyond needing dramatic victory propos and the occasional action shots are better.”

“Well, well, looks even Effie can surprise me,” Haymitch drawled. “Brave new world.”

“They didn’t air the footage from Victors’ Bayou, then?” she asked them.

“No. Nothing after you met with Mayor Solange and Four joined the war effort,” Magnolia answered her. “They were of the opinion that showing you injured would be…”

“’Utterly disastrous to the war effort,’?” Haymitch supplied wryly, in Plutarch’s posh Capitol tones. “With a side of ‘People need to see their idols as more than human, and after their seeing Katniss Everdeen’s death, admitting to a near-fatal injury sustained by Johanna Mason is a liability we can’t afford right now’?”

“Shit, you _are_ good,” Gunnar said. “Although he said they couldn’t afford to admit you got injured either, of course.” Haymitch gave an awkward grumble of acknowledgment at that.

“I want that footage handed over to me, then,” Johanna spoke up, cutting through any further lighthearted amusement they might have about it. They were only trying to destroy the anxiety and fear they must have suffered hearing that their children had almost been killed, and she wanted to be kind to them on that score, but this had to be done, and she had to make it clear that it mattered. “All of it. Every copy, if they made any.”

She’d burn it. If Snow had tried to destroy Finnick by somehow turning him into a weapon with tracker jacker venom, she wouldn’t let that asshole see it succeed by destroying Finnick with the entire nation with them seeing him deliberately shoot her and Haymitch, waiting for the right moment even as he’d been fighting by their side. She’d suffered being turned into a vicious, cold-blooded killer in peoples’ eyes, and maybe Finnick had honestly done something to warrant the title, but if he wasn’t in his right mind—no, people wouldn’t forgive, or understand, or forget. She’d spare him that further injustice and let him make whatever recovery he could without dragging the burden of national hatred along with it.

Admittedly, she also didn’t want anyone to see those would-be final moments between her and Haymitch, private as they were, true as they were, vulnerable as they were.

“Good idea,” Haymitch said softly, quiet enough for only her to hear, and she would bet he’d thought exactly the same thing.

Petra nodded. “We’ll make it happen,” she told Johanna. “The kids want to see you now, but we’re limiting them to a short visit.”

“Mom, I’m not—“ She wasn’t made of glass, didn’t need to be treated like she was so fragile.

“You’re heading back into the fight in three days, so you need your rest,” and it was just like it had been when Johanna was a teenager, insistently trying to buck Petra’s firm hand on the reins, both of them bristling.

“As long as we can get until their next required scheduled period,” Haymitch said coolly, his words cutting through the brewing fight and defusing it. “Lindy and Posy are young enough they need a little more time to be sure we’re OK, and we don’t get nearly enough time with them as is. And then I promise we’ll go to bed like good kids.”

Petra glanced at him, cocking an eyebrow, although with a slight smile. Then she looked over at Magnolia, shaking her head. Gunnar had disappeared, though he came back with the kids in tow, Vick giving her a shy little wave, and a wriggling, excited Lindy in Gunnar’s arms reaching out already to Haymitch and happily calling him “Unca”.

She looked them over, all standing there: her parents and her kids, the man who might actually become her husband in truth by her side. Ash, Heike, and Bern were still missing, but this was so much more than she’d have expected. All of them a little dinged and dirtied by loss and hardship, but here they all were, safe and secure and never alone, knit tight into a circle of family. Suddenly her chest ached and it felt hard to breathe, but she could admit that might not have all been her abused body.


	37. Chapter 37

Everything had happened so fast. One moment Annie was standing there on the stage with Finnick, on those old boards weathered by sun and salt wind, looking out over the square. A cold December day rather than a bright July, but the similarity was more than enough for her. Her mind snagged hold of last Reaping Day and hearing her name called, seeing Mags step forward defiantly, already signing her willingness to volunteer. Standing there, mute, in shock and mind racing with the idea of having to go back to the arena, but grateful that Mags would save her from dying or having to watch Finnick die or even kill him. Mingled with the gratitude was the heat of shame: guilty to the core in the knowledge that so many other female victors wouldn’t have that saving grace because they weren’t Career, didn’t have spare victors, and guilty that she was young and strong and an old woman like Mags would sacrifice herself. She broke the surface, just for a moment, and almost forced herself to step forward anyway, but the thing was done. She wasn’t even sure refusing a volunteer was possible, and when Finnick’s name was drawn moments later, she wasn’t surprised. Mags must have foreseen that.

Braided with that horror was her family on that stage: her mama and dad, Unalla—she’d forced herself to watch their deaths on that screen in Thirteen sitting alongside the other rescued victors, because they’d died for her sake, she could be strong enough to withstand watching it, bearing witness. She felt the shudder work its way down her spine as she imagined their faces, kneeling there with Peacekeepers behind them with their pistol muzzles pressed against their heads, and then…and then….she closed her eyes and pressed her hands over her ears, trying to shut it out, trying to claw her way out of that world of horror. _I am Annie Cresta, I am twenty-three years old…_ She reached for Finnick, but he’d let go her hand, and he wasn’t there, of course he wasn’t there, he’d been captured by the Capitol, and who knew if he was even alive or what they were doing to him. _You left him to die, after Mags died to keep you alive so he could come back to you. You didn’t even fight, did you? You let Haymitch do it for you. Weak. Pathetic. You call yourself a Career, a victor? You let everyone else fight for you._ Shaking her head, she tried to drown out the voices, the images, that assaulted her.

The gunshots sounded, and for how she imagined something so terrible should have ripped into her life like thunder, it was a distant crack, and then another, and another, and another. The screams and shouts, though—that aspect was new, the broadcast had cut off after seemingly endless seconds showing the Peacekeepers standing over the dead bodies slumped to the stage, and the people had been eerily quiet as they always were on Reaping Day as well, perfectly aware that causing an outcry at a Capitol demonstration would undermine everything Four had so carefully built to drag themselves out of the endless despair and poverty the other districts lived in. 

Confused, jolted out of the endless loop of horror by that nagging inconsistent detail, she opened her eyes. But apparently her mind still was playing tricks on her, because it couldn’t be real. People running and shouting, and she was alone on the stage, no Peacekeepers. 

Finnick—no, a stranger who wasn’t Finnick even if he wore Finnick’s skin, shouting and wild-eyed, dragged back towards the stage by the hands of several people.

A pool of blood on the cobblestones, and she couldn’t see who was there because others were crouching down surrounding them, their medic bags already open. They pulled Finnick further away and he seemed to sag, like a fish who’d fought the line to the end of its energy, letting them handle him like a helpless child. She watched as they bound him up. A tall woman wearing Peacekeeper white stark against dusty tan Five skin, barked that his arms should be _behind_ him. 

They used a constrictor knot to bind his wrists, because Four folk knew their knots. It would only pull tighter if he struggled, and the rope would strip his skin raw besides. Staring at that knot, identifying it as they tied it—that made it all suddenly, horribly real, because her mind wouldn’t make a nightmare that detailed. This was real. Whatever it was—what on earth had Finnick done?—had happened.

Now the medics parted for a moment to get someone in there with stretchers, and she could see the two limp figures on the ground well enough. Distant as they were, it was the general size and hair color, and their being right near where they’d been when she and Finnick headed for the stage that told her: Johanna and Haymitch. She turned away, unable to make sense of it, and it was all she could do to not go under again, lost in a crazy senseless world. Finnick had attacked them? Why? 

But she didn’t ask questions, sensing nobody had the answers to that except Finnick. She rode back to Thirteen in the hovercraft, the only victor of the four who’d gone to the fight in Four sitting there strapped into her seat, upright and awake. They kept Finnick sedated and tied up, and struggled in the portable med-bay to keep Haymitch and Johanna alive and stable. It felt like the longest, loneliest hours of her life. It was as bad as those endless hours of swimming all through the pitch-black night under a starless sky, utterly alone and helpless, so far gone she couldn’t even think about the Games and that final cannon she’d hoped for when the dam burst, simply trying to keep going so she wouldn’t slip under and die. Right now it was all she could do to not give in to the madness of it all and hide away in the safety of it.

When they got to Thirteen, they pushed her aside like a useless kitten in the bustle of dealing with it all. They took Finnick away for questioning when he woke up, and Johanna and Haymitch went right to the infirmary.

Standing there, useless and helpless, she had nowhere to go except back to her room. Cashmere was there, and Annie breathed a small sigh of relief at that. There was one person who had her back, at least. Although an icy finger of fear traced itself down her spine: she would have said that about Finnick, too. Even these last few weeks, he’d been distant, but she’d expected that as he recovered from the ordeal, and the loss of his arm and everything. She and Cashmere compared notes about Finnick and Gloss often enough that they both agreed that there were changed, but not a surprise. No victor ever expected anyone to come home from an ordeal the same as they went in. And Finnick might have been distant, and so she hadn’t forced herself on him. She’d wanted desperately to kiss him, hold him, give him whatever comfort she could, but he’d obviously needed time. But still he’d tried to be who he’d been, he’d been kind all the same, showing flashes of that same sweet and loving man she’d loved with her entire being. Now it seemed like that had all been a lie, because he’d been hiding more than just an ordeal from her. If he could lie to their faces for weeks in order to stalk in close and try to kill two of his closest friends, what had he actually been thinking when he talked to her?

“I heard,” Cashmere said, and Annie nodded at that, glad she didn’t have to explain.

“What, does the entire district know?” she said dryly, not liking how waspish she sounded, but unable to hold it back.

“No, I doubt they want it getting around. Sounds like they’re already suppressing the information. Lyme and Brutus got it from Fog, and she told all of us victors.” Cashmere glanced at her. “Niello said Snow didn’t say anything to him about it, but his guess is that Snow tried to mess with Finnick’s head, turn him into a Capitol agent to take Johanna out. Probably Haymitch too, Snow’s always had such a weird thing about him.” She glanced at Annie as she finished making her bed, neatly tucking the blanket in under the edge of the mattress. “Are people in Four going to tell what really happened?”

She sat down heavily on her own bed, still neatly made from where she’d left for Four several weeks ago. She pondered that over for a moment, and shook her head. “I doubt it. We threw our lot in with the rebellion well and good now, and it won’t help that to admit one of our victors suddenly tried to assassinate two of the big figures at the center of it all.” 

“Oh, it won’t much help Plutarch’s propos either,” Cashmere said with a raised eyebrow.

That was too much, the wry quip striking her in that soft, unguarded underbelly. She’d been the one who’d been right there on the scene to see the aftermath of the whole nightmare, the one left for hours and hours alone and trying to explain the unexplainable. “Damn you, Cash,” she said angrily, fingers clenching into fists, feeling the weight of it all descending on her again. No joke to her. Mags was dead, her family was dead, and Finnick had turned into a stranger, a deadly one, and so she had nobody and nothing felt safe. Was this how Johanna had felt, that bleak solitude that turned her eventually to angry bitterness?

She felt the dip of the mattress as Cashmere sat down next to her, and a comforting arm slung across her shoulders, hesitantly at first, but then pressing Annie against her side a bit more tightly. She couldn’t help but lean into it, grateful to feel less alone, and to find that the Cashmere she’d come to know in all those months fighting together side by side when Lyme and Brutus coupling up left the two of them turning to each other was still there. The kinder woman gingerly emerging from behind the hard eyes and cruel, cutting remarks—Annie willed herself to believe that Cashmere wasn’t a mask. They’d been through too much together for all of it to be a lie. 

She didn’t quite expect the pressure of Cash’s fingers on her cheek, carefully turning Annie’s face towards her, and then the hesitant touch of her lips. Just for a moment, she leaned into it. This had been there, hadn’t it? Especially after they got through training and she and Cashmere went to war together, Cash taking the place by her side that had been Finnick’s for the last five years, and every day confronted with the grim realities of war out in Two, she slowly started to accept that Finnick was probably dead. Johanna moved out after she married Haymitch and that same day Cashmere moved in, and some nights Annie would lie there in bed, hearing the comforting soft sounds of life, someone else’s breathing and movements there in the dark, and knowing she wasn’t alone. 

It wasn’t something she’d thought about consciously. It had just happened. Sometimes she’d look up over dinner out on campaign and see that little smile on Cashmere’s face, their gazes holding for a few moments. Neither of them said anything. Losing Finnick wasn’t something she would get over quickly, and as for Cashmere, she’d been there for Finnick. She’d imagined that the way the Capitol had tormented Cashmere and Gloss would be an even worse brand of mindfuckery and that would take time too. Unspoken, but they’d both felt the start of that pull, and she knew it, and she knew Cashmere knew it too. 

But that was before Finnick came back, and Cashmere hadn’t said anything after that, and Annie had been so relieved, so ready to pick up the old traces of where they’d left off and try to move forward together. Never mind that sometimes she’d wondered, in her fickle quicksand brain, if either of them could go back. Without Mags or Finnick, or even Carrick or Lateen or any of the other Four victors, she’d had to forge on and make new ties, find a way to get it done herself rather than letting them support her and make her path softer. That would have changed things, wouldn’t it? Not that Finnick had treated her as helpless, but he’d always been one who liked to smooth the course, serve others, taking pleasure in helping people in little ways. And maybe some of the things she’d simply accepted as proof of his affection before, now she’d want to insist that she could do it for herself. It was a matter of pride. She’d finally had people look at her and believe she was capable, not just “the poor mad girl”— _girl_ always, never mind she was twenty-three, because to them, she was a damaged, incapable child, never to become a woman. She was Four’s victor, so fragile and feeble and fey that the ever-loving Capitol tenderly encouraged her to stay home for her well-being.

As for Finnick, he’d obviously deliberately hidden the depth of what had been done to him, but there had been such stillness, a brooding distance. He’d always been so open with her before, but he’d reminded her of Haymitch when she’d first met him during her oh-so-brief days in the Capitol during the 71st Games—minus the sarcasm. If there had been any alcohol in Thirteen, she’d have worried about Finnick turning to that. As was, she’d watched him carefully as they went through Four, and if he’d taken a swig or two of rum when locals congratulated him on surviving the Capitol, he’d put the bottle down again with ease and she’d breathed a sigh of relief. But watching him talking with Gloss and the others who’d been imprisoned with him with such ease compared to her, she’d started to wonder if she might not be enough to pull him out of it this time as she had when they’d met. 

Now…now it was far beyond all that, it was all a muddle, crowding in on her mind, and it was too much. It felt so good in that moment before she felt terrible. She put a hand on Cashmere’s shoulder, not to brace herself to lean further into the kiss, but to push away. 

Cashmere didn’t look away right away, gazing at Annie long enough for Annie to see the flicker of pain in those almond-shaped emerald green eyes, almost defiantly demanding that Annie see it. The pressure and the pain increased. Everybody was going to walk out of this hurt anyway, weren’t they? “Well,” Cashmere said finally. “OK, then.” 

Sitting there, Annie deliberately didn’t look away, reached out and put her hand on Cashmere’s shoulder. “It’s not ‘no’, Cash,” she explained, quietly. 

“But a month ago, it would have been ‘yes’,” Cashmere said, the hard brittle edge of bitterness entering her voice. “Or at least ‘soon’.” 

“Probably.” She owed that much honesty. She’d have grieved for Finnick still, maybe needed some more time to work through that, but the slow start of the “yes” would have been there, and the comfort of knowing that when she was ready to walk forward, something bright and wonderful would be waiting. But if she lumbered into it now, confusion and guilt would lie right at the heart of it. “But right now, it’s…everything’s such a damn mess. I need time. And space. I need to choose this, not just fall into it because I don’t want to be alone. And I need you, as my friend, if you can still be that.”

It could have sounded arrogant, gently turning that offer aside and then demanding Cashmere stay by her, on Annie’s terms. “You’re one of the few people I’ve got,” she explained, hearing the huskiness in her voice. Cashmere was the closest, and Johanna the next. But compared to being embraced by community as she had been for most of her life, whether it was blood relatives and then later other Four victors, she felt herself very much on the fringes now. “I don’t want to lose that. Don’t want to lose you.” 

Cashmere took that in for a moment. Then she nodded, slightly. She reached out and took Annie’s hand in hers, and Annie felt the difference—a comforting touch for a friend in a dark time, nothing insistently romantic about it. “Then I’m here,” she said. “But you need to be careful what you do with Finnick while you figure it out. He may be Capitol-bent enough that it made him try to kill two of his friends, but he’s dangerous either way. He’s Career and he was always decent to me, I’ll never deny that. And Snow should pay for doing this to him.” Her eyes went hard again, expression fierce and intent like a lioness on the hunt. “But if Haymitch and Johanna don’t do it first for what he did to them, if he hurts you, I swear I’ll put him down myself.”

~~~~~~~~~~

When it came to Magnolia, Phineas had never wasted time with lies and evasions. He’d paid for her at first. That brought a kind of awkward honesty—hard to keep up a pretense with a woman who saw a man in that kind of ridiculous neediness. Though after the first few times, after he got bold enough to offer to pay for the company he’d really wanted and asked her to stay to dinner, it moved quickly beyond that. The locals and the Peacekeepers both shook their head a little at their Head more or less keeping a mistress, but nobody actually did anything about it. The mining folk probably muttered, _Better he keeps to one trashy Westie woman than chasing all our girls._ From what he’d heard, Gallus Cray in particular was notorious in chasing young girls, not too picky as to whether they were sixteen or not, and Phineas highly doubted things had changed in Twelve enough that a half-starved miner girl probably didn’t still look even younger than she was. The man was an utter disgrace to the uniform he’d worn.

They’d gone on for years and years still hiding behind the acceptable fiction of him paying her for her body once it had moved far beyond that, and they stole hours where they could, always so aware of keeping up the pretense. Keeping up so many lies for everyone else, they’d both cherished that precious time together where they could afford honesty. Lying to her would have tainted that, so he hadn’t. Kept some things back, as did she, but that was acceptable, because they couldn’t fully share their lives. The Capitol and the world wouldn’t let them.

Old habits, though, had carried over into the years beyond and into their marriage, so when he found her reading to Posy and Lindy in their compartment, he watched politely until she’d finished and sent the kids off for their scheduled nap. Then he sat down beside her, and though that bright smile of hers at the sight of him still got to him, he wasted no time. “Nothing today,” he told her tiredly. Hours and hours sitting across from the pathetic spectacle of a one-armed man in chains, trying to pierce through his defensiveness and his confusion and his bitter words and get to some kind of reality there.

She nodded, grey eyes looking thoughtful. “They can’t be happy about that.”

“It’s been a week and I’ve gotten nothing out of him yet. Haymitch and Johanna leave in the morning and they want the whole mess cleaned up. Only so long they can cover it all by claiming Finnick had a nervous breakdown out there, and is being isolated and treated.” He had no idea what they were claiming for Haymitch and Johanna to cover their being in the infirmary. The sheer contortions of the truth would have been funny if the stakes hadn’t been so grim. “They’re already debating whether to turn him over to someone with more ‘vigorous methods’,” he couldn’t resist the sarcasm at the euphemism Coin had used for obvious torture, “or to just give up, eliminate him as a risk, and inject him with enough sedatives so they can say he ‘unfortunately died in his sleep’.”

She let out a sound between her teeth like she’d been punched, a low whoosh of air from her lungs. “Shit.”

“I just need _time_ , Nola,” he said, rubbing his hands tiredly over his face. “Though between you, me,” he rapped his knuckles lightly on the back of the bench, “and the bench here—I think we’ll never get useful intel from him. Snow didn’t want to use him as a spy here. He was a weapon, pure and simple.”

Arms crossed lightly over her chest, she turned further towards him. “Then what are you trying to do?”

“Keep him alive. There’s been enough wasted lives, don’t you think?” She gave him a knowing look. “And all right, yes, he clearly means something to Haymitch, and he’s had enough on his shoulders that he blames himself for, don’t you think?” 

She reached out and took his hand in hers. “Thank you,” she told him softly. She didn’t have to say for what. He’d only first seen Haymitch when he was three days old, and that at a glance while Nola went to go do the shopping because her useless ass of a husband wouldn’t lift a finger to do it himself. She looked pale and drawn and exhausted, like death half-warmed over, and he wished he’d been there for her in those agonizing hours. He’d glanced at the blanket-wrapped bundle in her arms, impossibly small, the tiny wizened face and those curious-seeming blue-grey eyes—his son, ho he could never claim, never help raise. He’d never been so overjoyed and downcast all at once. 

All those years he couldn’t be a father or husband, couldn’t protect his sons or the woman who’d been the wife of his heart. He’d done the best he could by Nola, Briar, and Ash when Snow tried to make him murder them, but he’d been forced by Snow to abandon Haymitch to whatever fate had in store. And that had been a whole shitheap of suffering. There was a lot to atone for there.

So if he could help by trying to save one of the few people Haymitch had allowed to be his friend, he would. Because he could tell from the months here getting to know the man that Haymitch Abernathy—he’d long since given up the useless resentment of the lie in that surname—had become that he wouldn’t want Finnick to die on his account. 

It sat more than a little bit ill with him to kill a man like a rabid dog anyway. He smiled at her, squeezing her fingers in his. It hadn’t been an easy seventeen years with her in Twelve, but he wouldn’t trade them back. He’d always been alone, a war orphan with no family and no past and nothing but a lifetime of devoted service ahead. No wife, no lovers in anything but a friendly, physical sense, no family. He took the exams for Head mainly out of a fear of anything beyond the walls that had grown up around him since he was six years old to the point they felt like security rather than confinement. He’d never imagined when he got assigned to Twelve that his life would change, that at thirty-eight he’d be pushed by one too-smart, too-brave miner woman to examine who he was and what he actually wanted from life.

It looked like Haymitch had to re-invent himself too in his early middle age—that must run in the blood. All those years he’d had to deny Nola and their boys, and he’d do his best still to restore Ash to her, but there was a peaceful contentment now to having Haymitch and even an awkward sort of trust and affection there, where Haymitch had always been defiantly with odds at him as a child, thinking he had to protect his mother from Phineas.

Not too old to re-invent himself one more time, even past eighty, and for a man who’d never been allowed to experience the fullness of fatherhood, the grandkids were a delight, and the chance to be around them so much with Haymitch and Johanna away so much certainly had helped. The littlest ones in particular helped get through his hesitations, embarrassingly aware that Magnolia, Petra, and Gunnar knew what the hell they were doing in a way he didn’t. 

He looked at Lindy, seeing her happily playing with a stuffed dog, the brown hair and golden skin that he shared. He shouldn’t admit to favorites, but she and Posy were his, ever so slightly. Posy was the age he had been during that long-ago war that cost him his parents and sent him to the path of a Peacekeeper, and knowing how decisively she’d escaped that fate brought a keen pleasure. As for Lindy, it seemed the more he was around his Seven-born granddaughter—and his Seven daughter-in-law, for that matter—the more some part of him looked at them, seeing the similarities, and he hungered to know his own roots in a way he hadn’t that he could ever remember. Chances were he’d never know, though. Some things just couldn’t be helped. It would be more than enough to have this family to call his own, an unexpected gift. “When this is all over, we should get the kids a dog,” he said. Poor Scrap had died a few months before he’d left Burnt Tree to come here to Thirteen. 

“Probably should,” she agreed, instinctively understanding the need to talk about little things that didn’t have to do with Finnick Odair’s fate or their fear about sending Haymitch back into the war when he was still so physically shaky after his wounds, to say nothing of his mind. Almost being murdered by a friend would screw anyone up a bit. But at least he’d have Johanna with him—a lot to be said for a loved one there as a staunch supporter. “We should do something about Madge and Vick.”

“Madge and Vick?” he said quizzically, looking at her. “Now, Madge and _Peeta_ …” All four of them could see that clear as day, and Gunnar had assured Phineas he’d help take care of some of the problem there.

“Vick,” Magnolia repeated, shaking her head slightly. “Ain’t surprised you three don’t see it. You’re not from Twelve.” There was no censure in her voice as she reminded him that though he’d lived there the better part of twenty years, he’d never been one of them. But he’d been hers. That was enough. “He told me once that Madge had kind of a thing with his oldest brother. Who was executed, mind. And his other brother died in that Games that Madge survived. He’s a good boy, Vick, doesn’t want to make a fuss. But it’s got to be hard for him to look at her and not see two brothers he’s lost while she’s survived, see?”

Now he could see it. Vick wasn’t demonstrative, but there was a slight distance between him and Madge. He’d chalked it up to her being the newest of the family, and maybe a preteen boy’s awkwardness at not knowing quite how to act around an older girl. But Nola’s perception was rarely wrong, and in reading that tangled web of Twelve reactions and feelings and social conduct, he trusted her utterly. He suddenly hoped like hell Madge hadn’t killed the second Hawthorne boy. “Best you talk to him,” he told her. “It’ll go down easier coming from someone from Twelve.”

“I may have to ask Haymitch,” she demurred, obviously reluctant to put a burden on her son. “Vick definitely trusts him most. Besides, better it be coming down from a parent. Don’t want to undercut him, or Johanna, by being the meddling grandparents—especially when they’re still settling in to the situation and the kids are too. Those two won’t always be away at war, so we should give ‘em every chance to be involved and handle these things that we can.”

One more thing he hadn’t realized about parenting, and he held back a mental sigh at that. Keeping in line dozens or even hundreds of young Peacekeepers, that was no problem. But figuring out the delicate task of how to be with his grown and married son? And five grandchildren, two of which were on the cusp of adulthood already? Planning the escape for Nola, Ash, and Apollonia—he couldn’t think of her as Briar—and then running a damn spy ring for two decades seemed less confusing. Clear-cut risks, clear-cut tasks and problems to solve, clear-cut where his loyalties and priorities stood, which certainly helped; this was far subtler and thus carried its own difficulties.

He must have made the sigh audible because she looked over at him with that slight smile of hers, squeezing his hand in hers—lightly, because of that fucking arthritis that seemed to make its presence known more every year.

“They’ll be all right out in Seven,” he reassured her, knowing her own worries. “They’re tough birds, both of ‘em. Look at everything they’ve already survived. And they’ve got each other now.” Finding them curled up together asleep in Johanna’s hospital bed, no denying that they’d finally taken that step forward. Better than Nola, probably even better than Petra and Gunnar, he understood how having someone after so long with nothing and nobody to truly rely upon, that could change everything.

Still, love couldn’t counter pure bad luck, and privately, he worried as well. It was too soon to throw them back into the battlefield, after the injuries and shock they’d received. “I hope so,” she murmured. On her face was that same worry she’d worn all those years ago, sitting in his tiny kitchen, ready to head home and watch the nightly recap with Ash. He’d watched it in the common area of HQ with the other Peacekeepers. Neither of them had said it, but they both knew that even as they sat there, Haymitch might have been dead for hours already. 

There was the camera footage of what happened down in Four, but Johanna had demanded it, and Phineas had it tucked away in his and Nola’s room, ready to hand over to Johanna when she got back from Seven. He figured it was better to get it from Plutarch and Coin early, before they got used to having it and thinking what they could do with it if they decided covering the whole affair up wasn’t in their best interest. He’d been tempted to watch it, if only for a moment, to try and understand what the hell had happened, see what clues it might lend about Finnick. But then he’d tucked the tape away. He’d had to watch Haymitch in those Games all those years ago. No need to give himself, or Nola, more nightmares by watching the grim action unfold in an unsettling voyeurism. They’d seen the aftermath clear enough. 

He squeezed her hand one last night. “I’ll go talk to Odair again,” he said. He might not know what to say to Haymitch exactly, but this much he could do—he could try to find the answers and provide some peace.

Coin intercepted him on the way, as if she planned it. She probably had. He’d bet anything the damn communicuff she made him wear had some kind of tracker in it. “Are you heading back in to see Odair, Colonel Fog?”

 _General Fog, you mean,_ he could have insisted. But she wouldn’t give him the rank he’d earned as a Head Peacekeeper. Only the President herself held that rank here. Frankly, he did it not as a stickler for protocol, just for the pleasure of ruffling her. He had her number on that—she loathed things and people that wouldn’t neatly join the system. Disorder got to her. Better to not waste his efforts annoying her and thus making himself a target, better to appear amiable and cooperative and then do whatever the hell he wanted while covering his tracks well. He’d managed it for years and years with Snow, hadn’t he? 

“That was my plan, yes.”

“Do you _really_ believe anything useful can be obtained from him at this point?”

“Always worth a try. I’ve got no spies who saw what was done to him, or what he might have seen or heard. So the man himself is the only potential source of information.”

She looked at him, eyes flat and cold. “The effort of keeping him alive and detained is starting to not justify the resources, Colonel.”

“So you said. I’d rather make certain he’s not a potential asset before you stick a needle in his arm.”

“Hanging, wasn’t it?” she said softly, those long-fingered hands making the motion like gripping a rope and jerking it tight. “In most of the poor districts, I’m given to understand. You were a Head Peacekeeper for twenty years. I’m certain you ordered your share of executions. You understand the necessity, and to this point, Finnick Odair is a man who you’ve very ineffectually interrogated. Not that I believe you’re bad at it, mind. Your talents as an intelligencer are undeniable and have proven invaluable in this war. But there’s nothing there to glean, I’d say. So I find myself quite surprised you seem so vested in keeping alive a man who’s a danger to others, and thus far, rather useless to your network.”

That was another thing that set him apart from the rest. He’d taken lives in his own way, but in a distant, hands-off way rather than the direct killing of the Games. He’d avoided executions as much as he could those first sixteen years. Found excuses, ordered floggings, other ways—only for capital crimes like rape and murder did he sentence people to swing on the gallows. All that changed when he called Snow to beg for the lives of his family, and Snow found him out. And suddenly that cool, dismissive tone from Coin felt uncomfortable like that cool, dismissive voice on the other end of the line. Once again, he heard seemingly innocuous words that held all the menace in the world behind them. 

_And I suppose the possibility at least exists that Haymitch Abernathy is your son as well?_ Phineas had been unable to lie at that point, standing silent as he held the telephone in his shaking hand, and silence probably spoke eloquently enough. _Very well. I see, General Fog. I see that I’ve been remiss in regarding Twelve under your watch as such a well-managed district whose citizens are pleasantly low-trouble. I see you’ve been remiss in your duties and your loyalties to the point of concealing a great deal, and that makes me severely doubt that the citizens of Twelve are truly law-abiding. I suspect Haymitch Abernathy is merely the symptom of a greater disease. And I trust from now on you will carry out your duties exactly as described and there will be utter transparency in your management and reporting for the remainder of your tenure, because you may trust that I’ll be watching. Now you’ll go do your duty and clean up this mess that you’ve helped create._

Those last four years as Head, the last three in particular, he’d had to do things that still haunted him. Lesser evils, perhaps, than sacrificing everyone in Twelve, but that didn’t make them right. Lorna Hawthorne was his first execution after Haymitch’s Games. No need for poaching and the like in the fat, happy year that followed the Second Quell with regular Parcel Days, but after the 51st, things went back to normal. The only thing that didn’t was the Head Peacekeeper, with Snow’s spies watching him. A little slip of a girl, only fifteen years old. She’d been so light, so small, that she strangled slowly. He’d watched the entire time, forcing himself to do it. If he could condemn her to die, he deserved to watch it.

Lorna Hawthorne who, if he asked Nola, he suspected would be the aunt or cousin to two of the children that he now claimed as his grandchildren. Enough wasted lives in his past, cut short only for the sake of bureaucratic demands rather than justice. She wanted Finnick Odair dead purely for eliminating an inconvenience. He’d block that from happening if he could.

He shrugged casually. “Do you think he’s precious to me in some way as a person, ma’am? He tried to murder my stepson and his wife. Not terribly endearing.” He hadn’t told Coin that Haymitch was his by blood as well as marriage. Old habits of playing his cards very close to the vest, and maybe she’d figured it out already, but no point handing her that information readily. “But if we can figure out Odair’s programming, as it were, maybe we could turn him as a counter-agent,” he said, thinking frantically, trying to offer up something, anything. “Snow will know he failed in his assassination attempt, of course, but if we send him back to the Capitol, claiming he escaped en route back to Thirteen and he’s been on the run ever since, came to Snow because now he’s a loyal son and the rebellion wants him dead…he’s always been a popular face on television. They may want to try to use him to counter Johanna. But if he’s actually on our side, he can spy in places my Peacekeepers can’t.” 

Oh, fuck, what was he saying? Making promises he couldn’t guarantee, signing a man’s life down a dark and risky path. But what else could he do with the woman right there ready to sign an order for euthanasia, ending a human life as a mere loose end tidied up? He’d helped Nola escape all those years ago. If he had to do it, he’d cut Finnick Odair loose too and help him run from Thirteen.

“I doubt they’ll use Odair as a counter-Phoenix of sorts. Mason’s usefulness as an individual inspirational figure is diminishing, I think, as Trinket has apparently pointed out to Heavensbee,” Coin replied. “The war has enough momentum to perhaps not need much in the way of inspiring propos to spur things on further. But you may have a point on turning Odair into a double agent.” She nodded slightly towards the heavy steel door leading to Finnick’s cell. “Very well, Fog. Carry on, for now.”

He mentally breathed a sigh of relief. He’d outwitted her, so it seemed, and she suspected nothing. It was a temporary reprieve, but for now, that was enough for him to continue and try to find a way out of this particular maze.

~~~~~~~~~~

For Gunnar, it was easy to relate to the two boys who had apparently become his grandsons. Not because of the simple fact of anatomy—he’d raised two daughters, after all, and they’d been far easier to love simply, uncomplicatedly, than his son. Bern had far more of Petra’s fire than Petra liked to admit, burning with ambitions and getting into trouble as he did, but unlike Johanna, he didn’t charge his way at it headlong, utterly passionate. He’d sidestep it all with a wink and a smile, and unlike Gunnar, who preferred to shut down attention as quickly as possible by deflecting it, he’d always seen the gleam of enjoyment in Bern’s eyes, as he basked in it.

He could love Lindy and Posy easily, young as they were, open and honest, and even with Posy’s dark Twelve looks, it was all too easy to remember Johanna and Heike at that age when he looked at them. The girls were a delight. Even Madge, cool and distant as she was at points, barely a child still and thus in no need of another grandfather, he enjoyed. 

But Peeta and Vick both, he could see himself in them easily, despite no shared blood. He’d been that boy growing up, the younger child behind brasher, louder siblings. The unassuming boy who people liked but didn’t adore—“he’s a solid guy”—someone who shouldered the burdens without flair and bravado or complaint, who spoke up calmly and measuredly to smooth things over and keep the peace rather than to start a fight and ruffle feathers. He’d been someone who always preferred to not kick up a fuss and thus stood a little bit in the shadow of others. Quiet, worthy, and thus fairly unremarkable to most people, although he sensed in Peeta’s case, given the few remarks Haymitch made about his dead family, that the boy had desperately _wanted_ to be overlooked. Even last year’s Games, he’d called attention to himself only to try to put it right over to Katniss, and Gunnar could only imagine what an act of courage it had been to coolly put himself forward like that rather than fading into the background as he must have desperately wanted. Though being unremarkable in the Games wasn’t safe. Peeta must have realized that.

Gunnar’s family hadn’t been violent like that, but the Masons carried their own burdens carried forth by him and his siblings, and there was another thing that bound them together, and every time he saw the shadow of hopelessness in those blue eyes, it was like being eighteen again. Easy to be the one to instinctively shoulder everyone else’s burdens, but when the time came to need help in return, it wasn’t always so easy to reverse that and ask others to take on some of the weight. Too easy to get used to being the one everyone else leaned upon and praised for being solid and dependable and without dramatics, and not want to risk even that muted praise.

Too easy to slowly drown, slipping under by inches, all the while smiling and pretending to the world that he was fine, just fine, because he wouldn’t be the sort to make a spectacle. So he asked Peeta to go walking. Johanna was still stuck in the infirmary with Haymitch, trying to take it easy and thus recover as much as she could before heading back to Seven. But the boy needed to keep exercising those legs, and damn stale tin can of a place anyway, it was good to get out. Breathe in some of the crisp winter air and feel like a free man again. Apparently in Twelve they all lived jammed together on top of each other, penned up inside of that fence, away from the trees, away from any kind of privacy. The thought of it made him shudder, but even that wasn’t as bad as Thirteen. So long as he could get out now and again, it kept him from going crazy. Though even then it would be a quiet kind of crazy—no outbursts, no fuss. He was well suited to Seven that way. Small wonder Seven had eyed Johanna, or at least what they thought Johanna had become, askance.

Keeping his pace to Peeta’s slow trudge through the ankle-deep snow, ready to reach out and steady him if need be but sensible enough of a young man’s fragile dignity to not do it except if a genuine risk of a face-plant was there, he stuck his hands in his pockets. Better that than the ragged gloves that were the best they had right now in Thirteen, and no wool available to try to knit new mitts or the like. If this war went into a second winter and the Capitol still had Eight underneath its boot, didn’t matter how much of the food supply they controlled, as they might be in real trouble for lack of clothing. Either that or they’d all end wearing a hell of a lot of leather clothing and working the tanneries in Ten to the limit.

“Take a minute?” Peeta asked, leaning up against a tree trunk. Gunnar nodded. Not a bad idea. Here in the northeast of the country, it was that damn wet, windy, bone-chilling cold that bit through to the bone, rather than the dry, snowy weather they’d had in Seven, or even in the high mountains of Two. And for a man near seventy now, it hit all the harder, bones aching a bit. “I don’t imagine you asked for a walk, on an overcast day, just for fun,” Peeta said, looking over at him.

It was all in the tone and the attitude. From Bern as a child, it would have been a sly quip, masking his irritation. From Johanna, it would have sounded like a defiant challenge, demanding the truth. From Heike, it would have been earnest and direct, and that was how Peeta came across as well. That was easy to deal with. “I’ve been seeing a few looks between you and Madge lately,” he answered.

If it wasn’t for them being already reddened by wind and cold, Gunnar would have bet those pale cheeks would be blushing bright. To his credit, Peeta didn’t evade it. “Is it a…problem?” he asked quietly, slumping back against the tree trunk. A small, sad little smile on his lips, he looked away. “I’m sure some people would say it’s not right, it hasn’t been nearly long enough since K…” His voice suddenly choked up, as if the mention of her would still be too much to bear.

“Mmm. Don’t know that most people would say that. You’ve been listening to the Capitol a bit too much there. Plenty of marriages in a hurry just to get by after you lose someone, grieving still or not. But it hasn’t been long enough for you, has it? You still can’t say her name.”

Arms crossed over his chest, as if trying to hug himself, Peeta suddenly looked small and defenseless. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over her, not really,” he said in a raw near-whisper. “I shouldn’t forget her. It’s not…decent.”

“You won’t ever forget her, believe me. You shouldn’t. But losing her doesn’t have to be the end of everything for you.” Something in his tone must have gotten through, because Peeta lifted his head, and even with everything he’d been through, those blue eyes were so young in that moment, looking to someone to somehow help make the pain go away by making sense of a mad, unbearable world.

“You lost someone too,” Peeta guessed, not looking away.

He nodded. “31st Games. Her name was Sabina. Johanna is Seven’s only female victor. So you can guess what happened.” 

He thought he’d gotten over all of it, long ago, made a life with Petra, had three children. But he’d gotten to Three and seeing Beetee Latier, having to be around him, sometimes brought back a faint echo of old pain, like the winter ache in his bones right now. A man of Gunnar’s own age, small and a little plump, glasses and rapidly balding grey hair, and yet in Gunnar’s mind, all too easy to remember the odd little Three boy with the twitchy features and too-big glasses, patiently building his electrical trap in the woods. The Careers hadn’t won that year. Beetee wouldn’t have been anyone’s bet. If something had gone different, she might have lived instead of Beetee. His life might have been different. And even if he wouldn’t ever trade Petra, and Bern and Johanna and Heike, back for that life that might have been, he’d been surprised that almost forty-five years later, it still had the power to sting. 

It was something he wouldn’t tell Petra. She understood many things, but not this. The only boy she’d had court her when she was younger had been brutal to her, so no love lost there. No need to hurt her by making her think that she somehow wasn’t enough to completely uproot everything of Sabina.

“And of course, didn’t help about things at home. My mom…I was the youngest of three. My mom died in childbirth. With me.” Leaning back against a tall birch himself, he tried to not let all those old feelings bubble up, keeping himself calm. “My dad lost the love of his life that day. He never got over it. And he never let my stepmom, or me, forget it.” Nights with breath sometimes reeking of spruce vodka, saying bleakly, “You killed my Kirsten, boy.” Like coolly stating facts. _Gravity makes acorns fall. Winter’s gonna be cold. You killed my Kirsten, boy._ “Boy.” Never “son”. 

Probably a good thing he didn’t resemble Kirsten Thao Mason at all—and that Ulm Mason was dead by the time Johanna was born, the one who’d gotten her Oma’s beautiful hair along with her mom’s snapping, lively brown eyes. Gunnar’s dad had never laid a hand on Gunnar in anger, or his second wife either—and Gunnar had the suspicion that he rarely laid a hand or anything else on her, period, and only dispassionately at that. Not likely celibate, but it would have been just scratching an occasional itch with the convenient woman right there in his bed, never letting her forget that she’d never have his love. He’d needed a mother for two girls and a newborn boy, and Tilia had accepted that. No coincidence, Gunnar was sure, that he’d had no little half-siblings. Tilia was too wise for that, seeing how little Ulm already cared about Gunnar and her both. But indifference was more than enough. Some days, Gunnar had thought anger would have been better. At least then he would have _mattered_ to his father in some way, screwed up as it sounded.

Peeta’s eyes quickly darted aside, and then he breathed out a slow, shaky breath, like a small, scared animal trying to calm itself recognizing there was no escape. “Haymitch has been talking, I see,” he said, and Gunnar had gotten used enough to that twanging Twelve accent now to hear how flat his tone was beneath it.

“Not really. He didn’t say much at all about it.” A few cryptic remarks here and there about an unhappy home life, but Gunnar could see the fierce protectiveness there well enough on Haymitch’s part, keeping back that information, and the desire to keep Peeta from being hurt again. “I don’t know if your dad beat you, or ignored you, or what, but…” 

“No, my ma,” Peeta said, shaking his head tiredly. “My pa, well, he just liked to ignore it all as much as he could. Pretending all the ugly away. Because he was still living over twenty years in the past, telling all us three boys these wistful stories about the first woman he loved, the one he lost to a coal miner. He never got over her, he couldn’t ever not smile at her when he passed her. He didn’t want us, didn’t want that life, so he never bothered to fight her. He wanted what he never got with the girl he lost. My ma knew she was second best, and she hated us kids for our being there and keeping her stuck with a man who never much wanted her.” Peeta shook his head tiredly. “Farl got it worst, because he was the one that made them marry. Bannick got it bad because he always defied her. Me, I learned to keep her happy. Still wasn’t enough.”

The words, bleak and sparse, hurt to hear, but now the pieces clicked into place and he could see far more of the person Peeta was than he had before, and it was a sad picture. But that explained how Peeta had come to obsess over the idea of love and first love to the point of being unable to move past it. “Don’t take Haymitch being alone all these years for inspiration either,” he said dryly. “Ask him, honest as you like. He loved a girl he thought he lost, yes, but I imagine he’ll admit that it wasn’t just love that kept him alone all these years.” 

“No, it wasn’t. He told me that already. And he definitely loves Johanna now.”

Clever boy to see it—his daughter and her husband weren’t glaringly obvious, but for people who bothered to look at subtle things in people, who knew those two, it was obvious. “Yeah, he does. Point is…first love hurts when you lose it, but my dad, your dad, they both fucked up a good thing by refusing to see what good they could have had. And they passed that on to you and me. I spent a dozen years refusing to get over Sabine because all I’d ever learned was that you lose your first love, it can never be good again. I was lucky enough that I still found Petra. Haymitch is lucky he’s got Johanna now. So you grieve for Katniss. You should. Don’t jump into something with Madge or any other girl just because you hurt. But she’s gone, and she loved you, so she’d want to see you happy. You don’t owe her ghost the rest of your life.”

Peeta nodded at that. “I’ll try,” he murmured, looking away, the words awkward.

“That’s all a man can do, son,” Gunnar answered him quietly. “But we’re here for you now. Madge, Haymitch, Johanna, Petra and me, Phin and Nola—we’re your family. Even Lindy and Vick and Posy, they might be too young to help you, but they love you.” For a boy who’d hidden so much and been left to fend for himself, it seemed important that he know that for certain. “No shame in leaning on your family when you need them. That’s what they’re there for. And you learned from your dad who you didn’t want to be. You’re already a better, braver man than he ever was. Don’t you forget that either.” 

The way Peeta brightened at that, like a poor rain-drowned sapling drinking in the light and starting to thrive and stand tall again, almost hurt to see, but at least he could hear the words and believe them. That said plenty about his strength that his damn worthless family hadn’t rotten him all the way through, and Gunnar couldn’t help but be relieved that once again, the boy he’d seen on television, his deep and quiet strength overshadowed by the fiery girl he loved, wasn’t all a Capitol fiction.


	38. Chapter 38

Miles down the shore of Lake Sawyer lay the winter town, but the hovercraft had landed short, and distant enough so that any Peacekeeper or spy eyes in the town wouldn’t see them coming in and sound the alert. This was the old landing strip; the winter town itself was too hilly to find a good place to land. Every spring they’d herded the Seven lumberjacks here by train, taking them by further train lines to deploy to their first camp assignment out in the distant woods, places far-flung, ranging from down south a ways to the riverlands, and sweeping in a great arc north and west almost to the western ocean. Then they all crowded back down for Reaping Day and the expectations of the cameras, and headed out back again, and then come fall they all poured through here again, ferried down to the winter town. The hovercraft landing pad was here since hovercraft would have to take teams to the exploratory lumber sites that didn’t have rail spurs built yet, not having proved their worth as a solid logging site to invest in railways.

She stood near the train station, as ever slightly dilapidated and with the roof sagging and some of the wall boards peeling out like curling string of birch bark, and looked out towards the lake, grey and churning angrily in the breezy day. Across the way, easily distant, was the familiar spur of rock, with its jagged split like the slice of an axe into a tree trunk. It rose in a sharp cliff out over the water, piled high with pinky-beige rubble that had once been a lighthouse in the days of old North America. She’d been through this station several times a year for sixteen years of her life, and she’d never seen it so unfamiliar and new, snow-dusted like this, though. Her own home, barely an hour’s travel further up the coastline by train, and she’d never even seen it like this because every winter, she’d been trapped in town by Peacekeepers. She’d never seen it in high summer either, come to think of it, and funny how the idea of having little freedoms and choices like that tasted so sweet now, after the Capitol and after Thirteen’s rigidity.

They’d been here for a day and a half already, waiting for their reinforcements to arrive from Nine and Ten on their horses, and the wait, constantly poised on the edge of the fight, was too much to bear. But the moment she turned her thoughts to the battle ahead, though, it got hard to breathe, and she could feel the prowl of that dark monster in the back of her mind, ready to smother her. _Not you, asshole, not now…go away…not here, not in Seven, I can’t lose it here. Not again._ Her fingers curled hard into her palms, and if not for the leather shooting gloves she wore, her nails would have carved deep half-moons there. But it didn’t help. How could she trust anyone? They were supposed to be on her side, Seven-born and bred like her. But they’d turned on her once already, pushed her out into the cold. How far a step was it from that rejection to turning away again and refusing to fight, or maybe even trying to kill her if it served them better? She couldn’t breathe, could still feel the hot sting in her chest from Finnick’s bullet, racking her lungs. How the hell had Haymitch ever faced going into combat again, with how badly he’d been wounded in his arena all those years ago? 

She half-turned, saw him there by her side as if she’d summoned him with a thought, and if she had, she had the crazy wish he’d somehow say something that might not make sense of it all or make it better, but at least would tell her she wasn’t alone in the suffering—he’d done that for her so many times over the years. “I remember it right, the terrain here’s no good for hovercraft,” Haymitch murmured idly, a faraway look in his eyes. “Twelve’s like that too. Not that we had anyone or anything too often that couldn’t come in by the bullet train, but hovercraft, they’d always have to land ‘em at the end of the valley if it came to it—there’s a few miles of paved road there, leading into town—get a car to pick ‘em up if it was some important person, send a truck if it was just some kind of supply run, or a work crew from Five or the like.”

She wondered curiously why he was yakking on about that detail. It wasn’t like him to ramble about trivia, and while she could imagine him remarking on the terrain, it would be some kind of strategy in that mind of his, taking the hills and the steep roads into account. If he opened his mouth and imposed on her solitude while she scraped herself back together, it had better be for something more than stupid crap like that. The flicker of annoyance flared hot within her. She didn’t have time for this shit, didn’t want or need anyone pestering her right then, while she tried to gather herself up and not puke into the trampled-down snow at her feet. “You getting homesick or something?” she snapped. “I never got the impression they much missed you in Twelve.” 

The moment before those eyes went cold and distant as winter winds and he nodded curtly. “Worried about the warmth of your own little homecoming, huh?” he shot right back, arms folding tightly over his chest.

The anger rose further, and the words were on the tip of her tongue, sharp and acid-laced. But another small, soft voice was there in her mind, asking her what the hell she was doing. This was who she’d been: angry and vicious, pushing everyone away because she felt off-kilter. Rattle her cage a bit and she went right back to it, didn’t she? Ready even to throw barbed comments at a man she’d sworn she loved, only days ago, just because right now he annoyed her by what—not reading her mind? Her eyes stung suddenly with something that wasn’t just the chilly air. She couldn’t do this alone, and after that hospital bed where he’d been the only thing that made any sense, she couldn’t bear the idea of chasing him off. She licked her lips nervously. “I’m sorry?” It came out as half a question, unfamiliar words as they were. “I don’t….” _I don’t want to be her. But it’s too easy still._

She felt like she could almost breathe again when she felt his hands grasping hers. “Shouldn’t have said it either,” he told her softly. “If they don’t appreciate you…” 

“Whether they care or not, so long as they’ll let me help them, but you, you’re my family now,” blurting out the words, but it wasn’t quite enough, and she added, “and…I love you.” No sound of a question about that. Had she said that to him? No, not yet. He’d understood it back in the infirmary, as she’d heard it in his words, but they hadn’t _said_ it. “Love you,” she repeated, gripping his hands tighter in hers, willing him to not let go, not walk away, even if she could be that fucking horrible still. 

“Love you too, Hanna Abernathy,” he said, and she looked up. She couldn’t see his mouth, muffled beneath a layer of scarf even as hers was, but she could see the sincerity in those eyes of his. Hearing that name, her name, on his lips, felt good. _Hanna_. Even the Twelve twang rather than the familiar Seven lilt couldn’t make it sound wrong. Hanna Abernathy, not the Capitol’s pet bitch Jo Mason. Not so simple a thing just as calling herself something different. The old ways were right there beneath the skin, waiting for her to stumble back on that path when she was as off-balance as she was right now. But maybe they’d get through it together.

“I’m gonna assume ‘Mitch’ is off limits for you.” It was the nickname the Capitol gave him. Chantilly got away with “Mitchie”, but she had the sense there was a whole bunch of history there, and it was a special exception for someone he looked at like a big sister. 

“Yeah. Capitol decided ‘Haymitch’ was too _hayseed_ ,” the word said in a nastily sarcastic Capitol chirp, “no pun intended. Usually just ‘Haymitch’ back home, but sometimes my friends called me ‘Hay’ when I was a kid.” The few beats of silence that followed seemed pregnant with meaning. “Haven’t heard that in a long time.”

She nodded at that. “Love you, Hay Abernathy,” she told him. The way the corners of his eyes crinkled, she had the feeling there was a smile beneath that scarf, and something genuine, rather than that wry grin of his. She wished she could see it.

“It’s being back here?” Not letting go her hand, he lifted their linked hands, flicked his thumb out, generally indicating what she assumed was the district.

Johanna forced herself to breathe in slow, even if the chill air stung a little bit in her still-tender lungs. “It’s that. It’s everything. It’s…I thought when I went to Reaping Day that I’d never come back. And maybe I didn’t want to, being the one who came back over a pile of victors’ corpses. They already thought I was bad enough.” Not that she’d really wanted to die, but what would the point have been of surviving and descending deeper into that darkness, becoming even more of the Capitol’s rabid dog, vicious enough to cut her way through twenty-three other victors just to preserve a life that held nothing in it and nobody who needed her as justification? She wouldn’t give up and die in the arena, but she could admit now she hadn’t had the fire to want to get through it alive. The angry will to fight and to give a huge “fuck you” to the Capitol if at all possible, yes, but that was a different thing. “I wasn’t going to roll over for them. I was going to go down fighting. But I didn’t really _want_ to come back. Not the way someone like Finnick or Katniss did.” 

“Hell, why would either of us have wanted to come back alive? Think I didn’t plan on letting that be the end to my own little miserable existence in there, once I knew Katniss would make it through and assuming Peeta hadn’t screwed up that plan? You have to really want it to be the one that survives.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “Though she didn’t want to come back. It was all about Peeta for her this year. Assumed she’d die in there. Almost funny, both of us sitting there planning to not come back, but she’s the only one who managed it.” His eyes went to hers, suddenly a little too bright. “Maybe that’s why she didn’t make it. She didn’t really want it, not like last year.”

There didn’t seem to be much she could say to that, but she pressed his fingers a little tighter in hers. “I didn’t expect to come back from the arena, but I did. And then I started to get ready to come back here and deal with all of it, because we’ve known for months we’d be fighting for the winter town now. But then I almost did get killed, by my own friend. And now I’m here…and it’s all a fucking mess.”

She saw on his face, in his eyes, that he understood. He didn’t promise anything foolish as that she wouldn’t be in danger or get hurt. Neither of them was naïve or stupid enough to believe in uncertain guarantees. Only nine days ago Finnick had shot them both down like they were nothing more than a pair of dogs. And it wasn’t all physical risk. She’d have to face everyone here she’d shunned for years and treated with an angry scorn, and open herself up to their judgment. It was easy to be the mythic hero and the avenging angel against the Capitol to Nine and Ten and all the rest. They hadn’t had to live with her all these years, hadn’t seen that even when the Games cameras stopped rolling and she went back to Seven, her mask didn’t come off until it had become her whole self. “You won’t be alone. You know I won’t leave you.” He’d been right with her through all their fights so far, would have died protecting her back in Four, so she couldn’t do anything but believe his words now. His fingers twitched in hers and then steadied and relaxed—so he was afraid too, but like her, he’d face it. “Remember we said you and I might need someone to remind us we’re more than the worst we believe of ourselves? Think I’m calling that due now. You shouldn’t be ashamed to face them. And when it’s over…you’ll show me around the place, huh?” Casual sounding words, but funny how the plan for there being an _after_ , and something as mundane as showing him around the place she’d grown up, somehow made the present, the risk of battle and then facing her own people, less nightmarish.

“Thanks,” she whispered through the lump in her throat. “Tell me you want to come home from this?” She’d seen the brooding looks on him over the last few days, afraid that it was catching up to him again. Haymitch wallowing in the depths of despair had never been a pretty sight, alcohol or not. 

“You, the kids—look what I’ve got to stick around for now.”

“Not as an obli—“

“No,” he interrupted her, gently. “Not as an obligation.” 

She nodded at that, nothing else needed. “Then let’s go get this thing started. If we take the town—think about it, a shower, long as you want. Or even a bath.” Four had been subject to water rationing thanks to high tides and flooding that had screwing up the water supply. After Thirteen, they’d adjusted to that easily. “And I’m pretty sure I still had plenty of coffee in the kitchen.” She’d also had some alcohol as well, and she wondered if she’d have to hide it—maybe not. 

He cocked an eyebrow at that, a sarcastic ink-black arch over the sudden warmth of amusement in those silver-grey eyes. “Oh, now we’re down to bribery?”

“Soft, comfortable mattress,” she said in an over-the-top breathless, sultry voice, teasingly fingering the lapel of his grey jacket. “Sleeping in late. Going to bed when we want. And there’s that downstairs fireplace…” The urge to laugh rose within her, and she could see the change in his features, the lightness there.

“Oh, my, my. You do know what gets to me.” 

Dramatic Capitol movies would have had them attacking at the stroke of noon, riding down the main road of the winter town with guns blazing, like a silent menace. Of course, the Capitol probably expected something like that given their raids in Nine, Ten, and Eleven.

But they had an advantage there. Of Seven’s fifteen thousand citizens, nearly six had freed themselves throughout the summer and autumn in the various battles out at the lumber camps, or by simply slipping away. Spies said they’d vanished into the woods in scattered bands to avoid the Capitol trying to find them and bomb the shit out of them, and were living off the land—she’d felt a fierce surge of pride at that.

They’d come back now, answering the summons that had been carried to them by messengers. She had the feeling finding them had been a task, because nobody knew woodcraft and how to use the forest as a hiding place like a lumberjack, and thus much of the relay had been by word-of-mouth between the bands. 

She looked them over in the morning light, surprised to see almost no children or elderly, and most of them were either visibly under twenty-five or over forty. Now it made a terrible sense. The ones who could have easily fought back or escaped were adults still young enough to be in good shape, despite the gradual toll the brute labor of lumberjacking took over a lifetime, and by fifty most of them looked older than their years. But these were also ones without kids younger than reaping age, which described many Seven adults between roughly twenty and forty-five.

Seeing how bedraggled they looked next to the Thirteen soldiers and even the slightly ragged irregulars from other districts who’d come to join this new battle. Most of them had been out in the woods for months now, in the now-threadbare jeans and shirts and light autumn jackets, if any, they’d run away in, covered with rough ponchos of crudely tanned leather or fur or an old blanket. From how the others carefully avoided them, chances were they hadn’t bathed in a while—for lack of soap, and warm water. Long, dark hair greeted her, and beards on some of the men who hadn’t made ragged scarves from the remnants of other clothing. Some had bandaged hands—presumably frostbite—or racking coughs, and she saw some bloody tracks in the snow.

It was a lean time now, when hunting and gathering had been closed off to them for weeks and weeks due to the frost and the snow. Those that had managed to stock up during the easy days of autumn had a better time of it. Those that hadn’t—she saw some sunken cheeks already on those without scarves. These would be the fat days in the winter town, well-fed at less physically demanding jobs, but they were anything but that, looking worse than the pulled-thin look most lumberjacks wore by the end of lumber season. Confronted with the reality of the free Seven folk, she realized how bad off they really were. Scrounging for food, with only the basic supplies they would have scavenged from the lumber camps, improper clothing, and no medical care. Her stomach dropped: few kids and few old folks stood there now, because the ones who had been out in the woods had likely been the first ones to die. 

Estimating how many there were, she did the quick math, guessing that probably only about half of those who’d escaped the Capitol were here now. She wondered how many had died out there already of injury or animal attacks or starvation or disease, or perhaps hadn’t been located or were so far in the northwest, unable to travel the full distant on foot in winter. That was a death sentence for anyone left alive out there. Coin would give some speech about priorities, and sending hovercraft to search for missing Seven folk in the thick northwestern woods wouldn’t even register as worthwhile in her cold calculus. Johanna knew that as surely as she’d ever known anything. This was their last chance. Now taking in the sight of several thousand of them gathered there, an odd mixture of green youths and grizzled middle age, they’d obviously come here to fight, because the only other option was to die out there in the wilderness. 

_Fuck you, Coin,_ she thought angrily, because Coin had insisted that Seven wasn’t a high priority and Johanna had needed to argue her into even this winter assault. And of course Seven didn’t need help and the effort to locate the scattered free folk wasn’t worth the effort, and with supplies stretched so thin besides they had to prioritize. And without the ability to recharge the cell phones and call the Peacekeeper spies who’d defected, they’d had no information to the contrary. And Johanna herself had been so fucking focused on everything else, and everyone filling her ear with how she couldn’t be preferential towards Seven, and when it was summer and autumn, it was easy to believe they’d be OK, knowing how capable every lumberjack was out there in the wild.

She could either get terrified of what they’d think of her, the Phoenix who they could so easily believe had abandoned them, or get pissed off. She chose the welcome heat of anger, because it was a righteous wrath. She let a hiss of air between her teeth. “That _bitch_. Look at them. We’ve gotta take the town quickly, if nothing else so they can go home and get warm clothes—I’m calling her and getting a food delivery set up. We damn well have enough food she can send a shitload of it. And whatever medical supplies I can wrangle out of her.”

“Let me make the call,” Haymitch said quietly. “Keep the couple ‘I’m the Phoenix’ cards you’ve got left for where they’ll actually do some good. She’ll know you’re asking because it’s Seven, and you don’t want to hand her something that she knows gets to you that much.”

She was about to snap at him that she wasn’t an incapable brat needing him to do everything for her, but she reined it in at the last minute—that wasn’t his style. He was better at slyly talking around Coin and getting something done out of it, rather than charging in headlong like Johanna did. Besides, chances were she’d end up just screaming at Coin because it mattered too fucking much, and he was right that letting Coin know it mattered wasn’t the best idea. Coin responded only to numbers and cool rationale, not passion. “All right. But you damn well get it done,” she muttered, voice thick.

She had to say something to them, but everything seemed too trite or too fake. But she could see the well-tended axes hanging on their too-large belts, and the steadiness of the brown or hazel eyes in those weary faces. They’d fight, as only those who’d stared down death and found themselves cornered and without options could fight. Somehow, seeing that in them made her lingering shadow of fear about her own thin thread of mortality dissipate. 

Giving her voice enough volume to carry hurt her lungs, but that didn’t matter to her. “The Capitol put me in the arena twice,” she told them. “No food, no water, no medical care, predators, disease, people hunting you—that’s been your lives since you fought back, and you’ve survived all of that out there.” Fumbling with the buttons with fingers shaking from nerves or cold or both, she managed to pull aside her jacket, shirt, and undershirt enough to show the angry red pucker of the bullet hole, and taking the rubbing pressure of layers of heavy clothes off the still-sensitive scar actually felt good. “Someone from the Capitol,” true enough since that hadn’t been Finnick, it was a Capitol-manufactured mutt, “tried to assassinate Haymitch and me less than two weeks ago down in Four. Almost did the job. We both just got out of the hospital yesterday afternoon and came right here.” She heard the murmurs of surprise ripple through the crowd. Screw Plutarch and Coin not wanting that to get out. They were staring the empty skull-sockets of death right in the face and had to be deeply afraid, and so was she. It seemed only right she tell them the truth rather than appear like some spotless, well-scrubbed and well-fed savior. 

She’d never reveal it was Finnick, she’d hidden the tape deep in her bag, and would burn that footage first chance she had—if she could have lit a fire in Thirteen it would be done already. She hated having to carry it with her and risk getting it captured, but she didn’t trust leaving it in Thirteen either. “We’re all at the end of our ropes right now, because we’ve all faced up to how easy it is to die. But truth is that there’s nowhere to run. So I’ll fight if you will. Because this is still my home and I’m fucking sick of them controlling our lives, because even when you fought back, the freedom you won was to live out in the woods while the Capitol still kept you vulnerable and afraid. So I say we throw them out for good. And if—no, when—we win the winter town back, I won’t leave on that hovercraft for Thirteen. I may have to leave again in spring when the fighting starts again, because the other districts deserve to be free too, and anyone who wants to fight with me, like these people,” she gestured behind her to the gathered fighters from the other districts, “have been, will be welcome. Nothing like a good solid Seven axe in a fight. But as for me, and any of them that wants to—we’re gonna stay the winter here with you here, and help you get back on even keel.”

A ridiculous, rash promise, but it felt right when she made it, atonement for the years she’d spent shoving them all away and judging them and hating them a little. This was the crucible she’d needed: either she could find a way to belong among them again this winter, or she’d know there was no future left for her in Seven and make her peace with it. She heard Haymitch’s sharp intake of breath behind her, but she couldn’t back down and couldn’t apologize, even if she’d committed him, and the kids as well, to that course too. But he surprised her with a small chuckle and a soft-spoken, “You really want us all to get some fresh air that bad?”

“And you don’t?” she said, not turning to him so she didn’t have to look away from all the eyes on her, but relieved by the teasing that told her it was all right and he didn’t resent the high-handedness of her essentially committing them all to it.

“Meh, I’ll figure out how to sell Coin on it,” he answered, amusement obvious in his tone. His eyes roved over the assembled people. “There could be a chance…” he murmured, already turning on his heel. “Deacon,” he called, spotting the nearest Peacekeeper, and Ivy Deacon, who’d been one of the defectors earliest defectors, all the way back in Sunnydale, trotted up briskly.

“Yes?” Johanna had long since given up trying to figure out the origins of most of their Peacekeeper allies, since some of them were such a mélange that it was near impossible. Deacon’s bright green eyes might have been from One, but that reddish hair was probably Five, and that dark-olive skin—Eleven, Twelve, who knew? She was twenty-four, and honestly looked about five years younger with those elfin features.

“You and some of your buddies wanna go play Peacekeeper again, Deeks?” he said, lips curving up into that wolfish grin.

“Left my uniform all the way back in Nine, si—uh—Cap—“

Haymitch spared her trying to figure out how to address him. “Sounds like with Eight cut off from Capitol rail, Peacekeepers are feeling the pinch too for their nice, pretty white winter gear—hasn’t been a delivery for months and months. Bigger problem here than we saw down in Four, with as cold as it is this far north.”

Now Johanna caught on, remembering the few Peacekeepers down in Four who wore an assortment of mingled Peacekeeper uniform and civilian clothes. Here in Seven, with everyone heavily bundled up, it might be even more likely that the Peacekeepers would have to resort to it. “So if someone walks through town with a rifle and a Peacekeeper coat and a scarf over their face,” she nodded to the few white coats out there, since good cloth was scarce enough that by this point Peacekeepers and rebels alike were keeping and using them, “and they know enough to act like a Peacekeeper…”

“Business as usual,” Haymitch said with a nod. “Though you’ve never been in Seven, right?”

“No,” Deacon answered. 

“I have,” another of the Peacekeepers offered, having lurked a little behind Deacon and obviously listening, a man probably a few years younger than Haymitch with grey-grizzled light brown hair and eyes so dark they looked nearly raven-black. One of the new ones, from down in Blackwater Bay, she remembered. “Been a while, it was my second tour, but…” She tried to bite back the instinctive anger, wanting to demand to know what he’d done to the people in Seven while he was here for his five years. He’d stood and fought with them given the chance, and that was what mattered, right? “Lomonosov,” he offered his name.

“If we take down Peacekeeper HQ quick and quiet,” Haymitch said, staring at the two of them, “and order everyone back to their homes, and Peacekeepers to HQ for some special Capitol broadcast…”

Johanna nodded, recalling hearing the nasal female voice with its dulcet, sugary Capitol tones played over the public address system. “Doesn’t hurt either that the Head’s on our side.” That was a little bit of a shock, but according to Phineas Fog, Athena Law had been a spy recruit close to twenty years ago now, and had helped get Johanna’s family out of the district. At this point, she believed him. “Peacekeepers disarm when they go to HQ?” she asked Lomonosov.

“All weapons are to be checked in and secured in the armory rather than left out in the open in HQ,” he confirmed. “Same reason the locals will have to do inventory and lock down all of their sharp tools on the way out of their workplaces. It’s to control their access. There’ll be a skeleton watch kept out just in case of public disturbance, especially with a broadcast, but…”

“But small enough that with the majority of the Peacekeepers ineffective by being stuck in HQ weaponless, with the Head visibly on our side, and with another announcement by us that we have plenty of armed rebels with guns and axes ready to make life a problem for them if they don’t surrender?”

“What a difference a few guns makes,” Johanna muttered, shaking her head. Lomonosov was right. Given free access to either the axes and even the chisels and saws and the like from the workshops and mills, or some guns, Seven would have risen up long ago thanks to vastly outnumbering the Peacekeepers. The only thing keeping them from it was the knowledge of how useless fighting back would be, and the tight controls where a tool carelessly slipped into a jacket pocket and innocently forgotten at the end of the workday, and caught on the way out the door, was enough to earn execution. Johanna had seen her share of beheadings for that as a child. Thirteen had certainly done that much for things, in giving the rebels the rifles to help tip that fragile balance. 

“Not all of them will just surrender,” Deacon said, shaking her head.

“They will if they see a shitload of Seven people flooding the street with axes and they figure the toolsheds got broken into,” Johanna answered her, unable to help grinning in satisfaction as she imagined it, glancing over at her district mates with some pride. “Either that, or they get cut down in their tracks. Their choice.”

“No rifles in HQ,” Haymitch said. “Well, it’s hand-to-hand to take ‘em down in there if they won’t surrender. At least we’ll have surprise on our side. Lomonosov,” Haymitch was as well accustomed by now as Johanna to the military quirk, shared with Thirteen, that most of the Peacekeepers preferred to stick to surnames except among close friends, “you take point once we’re in town.” Deacon visibly relaxed, obviously happy to hand that over to a more senior officer. 

“We’ll need about a dozen people who can fight in close quarters. Deacon, your raiding squad’s good,” or what was left of them, anyway, after five months and plenty of fights. “So grab them and whoever else you may want,” Johanna told her. “Get them gathered, armed with weapons they can hide, and Peacekeeper coats for all of us.” She reached down, touching the hatchets at her belt for reassurance. “You,” she nodded to Haymitch, then jerked her head aside to indicate them stepping out in private, “got a second?”

He waited until the two Peacekeepers were out of earshot and quickly moved to stall whatever objections he imagined she had. “The lumberjacks who came in from the woods are beat all to hell, and they already fought back once. They’ve proven their point, haven’t they? And you said most of the ones here are the ones with families, the old ones—the people who couldn’t easily run into the woods. The ones who either can’t fight, or they have kids depending on them. I’m really not in the mood to throw away lives in a headlong attack for the sake of pride. Enough people have died already.” 

He’d try to spare as many people as he could, because he was tired of wasted lives. But he’d fight, despite the fear in him, despite the fact that he could have just delegated it to someone else and stepped back. She reached up and touched his face, the fingers of her right hand echoing the curve of his right cheek. The upper half of the thin, slashing scar from where he’d been bullet-grazed back at Milltown crept out from beneath his scarf. World-weary and war-bruised as he was, despite the fear, here he was, ready to stand by her side and fight again and give everything he had to the fight, while trying to spare as many other people that pain as he could. How could she help but love him for that? Maybe the fact he was as afraid as her right now strangely gave her a fresh reserve of courage. 

And maybe that helped with that other old, nagging fear, if only in that moment. She wished she’d pulled her glove off to have her bare fingers against his skin, but pushed that thought away, and still acting on the impulse, she stretched up on her toes, a little clumsy in the heavy snow boots. Taking a moment to tug down her scarf, and then his, she brushed her lips against his. She lingered only long enough to give him chance to respond and decide, and kiss her back for the barest moment, and then she backed away. Short, but with sweetness to it, it was a kiss simply for its own sake rather than the prelude to anything. She didn’t feel that increasingly familiar hunger within her for him, only a sense of something serene, complete. 

They would go into HQ and fight, because she might be scared, but she couldn’t sit by and let others die for her, especially not for her home district. If she died, at least now she could say that once in her lifetime she’d kissed a man she loved. And if she didn’t die, well, the next time would be when they were ready for it to be the start of something. 

She offered no explanation for the kiss. She looked at his face and saw it wasn’t needed. “I know,” she told him softly. “I’m sick of wasting lives too.” 

He smiled, and now she saw what he’d hidden under his scarf, a sweetly crooked smile that tugged up the right corner of his mouth. Something unaffected and vulnerable and genuine, and so she had the feeling it was something he’d show only to her.

It was almost too easy in the end, after the bloody fights in Milltown and through the various ports and villages in Four. Wearing Peacekeeper white jackets, they walked down the streets of the winter town, following Lomonosov’s lead as he muttered and nodded to other Peacekeepers as they passed. She tried her best to keep her eyes ahead, trained between the shoulder blades of Haymitch there in front of her and the black leather strap of his rifle slung there over the white wool of his jacket, so she wouldn’t look around as a Peacekeeper wouldn’t. But her heart wanted too much to drink in the sight of the familiar pain-in-the-ass rutted dirt streets now frozen over, the elevated wooden sidewalks that kept them all out of the mud, the shops—she could smell the warm, yeasty air from Ulme Brown’s bakery as they passed, and it made her mouth water. Though the Browns couldn’t be baking that much, as she’d sneaked a look at a poster with the Capitol eagle and bright red lettering warning about the strict food quotas, so the rebellion’s efforts in Nine and securing the grain supply had definitely taken a toll here already. 

No surprise the Capitol took a bite out of the districts’ asses first by restricting their food supply, and no surprise they made the cuts here in a poor district like Seven first rather than a rich district like Four they hoped to keep happy and loyal. Her heart pounded a little faster at that, eager to get it done and make certain everyone here got to eat. 

She didn’t look at the people, though. She hadn’t been able to let herself really look at the faces of the free folk, and she couldn’t look at the people here in the winter town because right now, she couldn’t bear to risk seeing any of the people she’d once known. It might stop her in her tracks.

They got into HQ, and from there, it was simple. Four tried to fight back, but several of the others saw the wisdom of not trying to fight against a bristling hedge of hatchets and knives there in their common area. Johanna slipped upstairs to the Head Peacekeeper’s office. Athena Law, probably close to fifty now, had an Eight look about her, burnt-caramel skin and brown hair, but strangely soft, almost sad milk chocolate brown eyes. She looked up and saw Johanna there as Johanna pulled down her scarf to let her face be seen. Athena glanced back down at a paper on her desk, finishing scrawling something there before she laid down her pen neatly. “Phineas warned me you were coming, of course,” she said. “I hope you have a good plan here, because he warned me Thirteen would probably want to put on some damn fool frontal assault with as impatient as they are to get this done, which I assume you didn’t do given you’re here already and not even a shout in the streets, let alone a shot fired. And if the plan was ‘Ask Head Law to make an announcement to the Peacekeepers to surrender’, that’s not gonna fly. They’re armed and if they know I’ve gone rogue, they certainly won’t just listen to me and lay down their rifles.” 

Johanna gestured to the computer console. “We need a PA, but not from you. You wanna cue up Cherry Wilde for the nice people, please?” Cherry had died when Johanna was still crapping her diapers, but the Capitol broadcaster’s voice lived on in the standard _important message from the Capitol_ announcement.

Athena Law smiled like a cat up to its whiskers in cream, understanding dawning in her eyes. “Oh, that’s a good one. I’ve got a few squads completely loyal to the cause, so I can make certain I assign only them during our—ah—supposed announcements. That way anyone out on the streets with a rifle in their hands is on our side.”

A few keys clicked under Athena’s fingers on the computer and suddenly Johanna heard, through the frost-decorated window, as Cherry’s syrupy tones boomed through the quiet streets, making the announcement. Then Athena added crisply, speaking into the intercom, “Broadcast will commence at 10:15 AM and is expected to last eighteen minutes, and then by 10:45 AM everyone should be back at work or school. Squads Charlie, India, Romeo, and Yukon will assume broadcast duty stations.” 

Johanna dryly thought that “broadcast duty stations” was a nice euphemism for “walking back and forth along the housing rows to arrest anyone who tries to escape the Capitol’s stupid fucking broadcasts by either stepping out or unplugging the television.” But she held her tongue as Athena took her thumb from the intercom button and laid the speaker down in its cradle again.

Haymitch joined them there, and then the rest of them, standing silent and waiting. Johanna glanced at Haymitch and he nodded briefly, telling her that the prisoners were stuffed away somewhere they wouldn’t warn the others coming in. She noticed their little group had expanded by half a dozen with new Peacekeepers from those who’d been hanging out downstairs.

She heard the sound of boots and voices downstairs as Peacekeepers filed in, one loudly complaining about yet another interruption during the workday, a booming voice saying in weary good humor, “Been enough war broadcasts in the last five months we should be used to it, Piper.” 

Athena waited at her desk, lithe body full of a coiled tension, and Johanna nodded to her, reaching for her hatchets again, leading the way down the stairs. 

She slipped down into the common room, and once they were all arrayed at the foot of the stairs and blocking the exits, Athena standing with them, she flicked on the light switch which they’d dimmed, presumably to better see the supposed broadcast. They froze like startled deer. She saw the stunned reaction, the recognition. “Hi there,” she said cheerfully, hatchets in hand and pointedly visible, stepping further into the room, sensing Haymitch by her right side, just a half-step behind.

Suddenly everything went eerily silent, all those Peacekeepers standing around or lounging in chairs and couches like a bunch of stone-still statues at having their home turf invaded so quietly and neatly, caught out so defenseless. She felt at least a hundred pairs of eyes on her in the crowded room. “So, you know me, you know what I’m here for, blah blah. Here’s how this goes. Seven’s declaring independence from the Capitol. The Peacekeepers out on the streets right now are with us, and we’ve got plenty of soldiers who were waiting—with guns, mind—just out of sight beyond the Memorial Grove hill. They’ll be marching into the town right about…ah, there they are.” She heard the rising noise out in the streets, the rebels rallying the people in their houses to come out, the people from Seven yelling in celebration. She grinned fiercely at the stunned Peacekeepers. “Anyone who wants to join us is welcome. Anyone who wants to try to fight,” she subtly lifted the hatchets, “isn’t gonna like what happens to them. Any questions?” 

“Ma’am,” one young man said, looking at Athena with a look of confused betrayal, “you’re…with _them_?”

“I am,” Athena said, after the barest pause. Must have been odd for her, Johanna decided, to declare so openly after keeping everything so tightly secretive for years and years. She got that same sense of hesitant uncertainty from her mom and dad sometimes, the marvel of now having permission to tell the whole truth openly, and got it even more pointedly from Haymitch’s parents. “I was with them even before I became Head Peacekeeper, in fact.” 

She could see it happen in their averted eyes and slumped shoulders. Most of them were so young, even younger than her. It was like the spirit had left them, everything certain crumbling around their ears with their leader not only defecting, but having actively joined the rebels years and years ago. There were still the defiant ones who spat fire and rage about it, and they were quickly set apart from the others as a lost cause. Johanna had to wonder what the hell Coin was doing with all of them, though she’d heard mention of a prison camp established in the northern borderlands to handle the increasing population of diehard Peacekeepers and Capitol loyalists. But the confused ones waffling about it—better to let the other Peacekeepers who’d joined the rebellion talk to them, work on them a bit and see if they couldn’t be brought around in the end.

She could hardly believe it. She’d been braced for a fierce battle, but they’d taken Seven with hardly any blood spilled, and compared to the bloodbath to capture Milltown, the wearying grind all across Four, and the ugly slaughter that Cashmere and Annie told her about that had ground to a halt in Two for the winter, this felt like an actual _victory_. The part of her that wanted to say it was almost too easy she promptly told to shut up, not wanting to question a turn of good fortune rather than grimly throwing more lives into the abyss. Likely the sense of triumph would sink in soon enough, like it was from the roar of celebration out in the streets. Right now she gave Haymitch a dazed smile. Trust him to get the ball rolling on some clever and unconventional plan. 

He smiled back at her, that little quirking smile that broadened gradually until he was outright grinning like an excited kid at New Year’s. “ _We_ did it,” he said gently, as if knowing what she thought. 

She couldn’t go out there among the others just yet, let alone go up the hill to Victors’ Glade and the house. “Might as well report the good news to Mommy,” she said, reaching into her pocket for the commlink, tugging off her right glove with the fingertips between her teeth, gently doing the disarm sequence so that it wouldn’t self-destruct when someone tried to use it. Another little feature from Beetee, given it was best to not risk leaving any secrets in the Capitol’s hands.

“Right before the bad news?” he said dryly, sitting down in Athena’s comfortable leather chair, leaning back and folding his hands behind his head. She had a weird sense seeing him sitting there so comfortably, dressed in that white Peacekeeper jacket. Had something in his life gone differently, had his mother died when he was still young, he might have been packed off to Two as an orphan like Fog had described. Smart man like him probably would have become a Head Peacekeeper too, if he’d wanted to stick around rather than retire and marry and try to raise a family. 

She couldn’t help but wonder who that Haymitch would have been. But chances were she never would have met him, would she? Or maybe he’d have been Head here in Seven rather than Athena, and she and that other Haymitch would repeat the story of his parents all over again. She could almost see that shadow version of herself stealing hours with him and spinning falsehoods for their safety, love and guilt and longing all wrapped together. Or they could have had that as victors, like Blight and Clover, stealing a few weeks every summer of heaven right alongside the hell of the Games, covering everything with a blanket of lies to keep it away from Snow’s awareness. It was a dizzying thought, and she pushed it away. No need to dwell on who they could have been, only who they could still be. 

“We’ll have to tell her we’re not coming home. Get the parents to pack our shit for us when they bring the kids,” she mused. She glanced over at him, giving him a smirk. “I know, I know, you’re doing the talking there.”

“What’s this? She _can_ be taught?” he drawled, and his head tipped back in laughter when she playfully flipped him the bird. It felt like nothing could be wrong in that moment. The low hum and the green flash on the screen told her she’d unlocked the commlink successfully, and she punched in the number for Command. 

Coin’s face filled the screen. “Abernathy,” she acknowledged.

“Abernathy and Abernathy, present,” Johanna replied flippantly. “We’ve got good news. District Seven’s secure.” She couldn’t help the pride in her voice at it. 

She felt Haymitch over her shoulder, heard him drawing in breath to presumably start drawing Coin in on aid for Seven and Johanna’s promise to stay, but Coin nodded curtly. She looked like she hadn’t slept since the two of them had left, dark circles shadowing those unnerving eyes. “As well there’s good news. It seems Coriolanus Snow has finally realized where the threat lies and that he can’t end this war with your death or with applying further fear and oppression in the districts. The Capitol bombers arrived without warning, barely two hours after you left for District Seven. They bombed us for thirty-nine hours and finally stopped roughly three hours ago.”


	39. Chapter 39

Looking at the commpad while leaning over Johanna’s shoulder, and Coin’s face there in miniature, Haymitch’s heart felt like it stuttered in his chest, and Haymitch heard the rasp in his voice as he asked Coin, “The kids? Our folks?”  
Coin’s normally eerie eyes looked even more unsettling with the blankness of fatigue. 

“All of them survived. As did all the other Hunger Games victors.”

He was an expert in knowing “survival” didn’t exactly mean “fine”, so he pressed again, “They’re OK?”

“There was an incident during evacuation to the lower levels. Your ward Belinda ended up carried away by the crowd during a rush down the stairs, and it seems Margedda ran back for her.” Haymitch waited, well aware that interrupting and demanding the information would only mean a delay in getting it. He could sense Johanna right there, tense as a garrote wire, but she held her tongue as well. “Belinda had no injuries, as Margedda apparently protected her as a bomb exploded nearby.”

“And Madge?” Johanna said, in a strange voice Haymitch barely recognized as her own, a growl that wasn’t rage. He could think of it as nothing but the protective sound of a mother bear.

“The burns and cuts were minor enough and will heal, albeit with some scarring. She was deafened by the blast and only time will tell if her hearing will recover, but more critical injuries are naturally taking precedence,” Coin explained tersely. All as matter-of-fact as if she were reciting the multiplication tables in school. “Two hundred fifty nine confirmed dead already, and several dozen more aren’t expected to recover.”

“Shit,” Johanna whispered, the word a whispered exhalation. He felt tongue-tied himself in that moment. He’d seen explosions in the arena plenty of times. And back in the old days, when victors were still prizes to be paraded in arrogant triumph rather than captive pets, old Cotton’s hearing had never been quite the same after he’d been caught in a blast in his Games, and they refused to fix it. The thought of Madge lying there in a hospital bed, injured—and then suddenly it wasn’t the blond merchie girl he saw huddled there, bloodied and exhausted and deafened, but the dark Seam girl, and he shook his head sharply as if to knock the notion loose. 

_Lock it down_ , he told himself sternly. He’d done it time after time with Snow, and he had to do it now with Coin, and not hand her anything that mattered when there was convincing and bargaining to be done. Coin was a blunter tool than Snow, but then, being the head of such a tightly-reined district hadn’t exactly instilled a need for Snow’s malicious subtlety. At least with her he could talk around her, coax her into some things. With Coin, it seemed more like a lack of compassion and imagination coupled with an inflexible will, and he could work with that, outwit her. With Snow, he’d simply accepted the edicts, heart pounding and throat tight with terror every moment. 

“All right,” he acknowledged, taking all his mind and will to inject a tone of calm nonchalance into his tone. “It’s understood that you have quite the clean-up operation on your hands and that’s gonna need the majority of your time for the next few months.” Cool, rational, just a touch deferential—exactly what she’d want. There was the ruthless part of his mind that noted, _She’s distracted. She’s got her own district to think about right now. I can use that._ The part he’d trained to shut out the emotion and simply do what needed to be done to save some lives, and count the cost later. He’d possibly feel guilty soon about using her moment of vulnerability, on account of all of those dead and injured to buy her being off-balance, but for now he shut that feeling down, not willing to fail those here in Seven because of sudden squeamishness. As far as selling his soul went, he’d done far worse. “However, the situation here’s got some issues.”

Nothing moved on those still, elegantly carved features. Coin might as well have been a figurine cast from porcelain, particularly with that pale, pale skin that likely hadn’t seen the sun in decades. “Go on.”

Keeping it as terse as he could, he explained about the quick, relatively bloodless victory in Seven—good news first. Then the bad, the dire state of those who’d walked in from the woods, and Johanna’s promise to stay and help them.

Coin’s gaze flicked over to Johanna. “Is that the case, Phoenix?” Johanna shrugged awkwardly. Coin gave a thin-lipped smile. “You’re usually quite full of opinions on a situation, and you’re apparently letting your husband-cum-spokesman do all the talking today?”

He tensed at Coin’s cool words, _husband-cum-spokesman_ , and understood in that moment that Coin read the situation quite well and knew exactly why Haymitch did most of the talking in the delicate negotiations. More dangerous than he’d estimated her, another carefully hidden viper, and immediately that prickle of alarmed awareness came over him. He locked it down hard, willing not a flicker of it to show on his face. Snow, if nothing else, had made Haymitch a master of that particular game. 

Meanwhile, he could almost feel the heat of Johanna’s anger at the condescending, thinly gloved barb, sensing her bristling next to him, but she surprised him. “Lost my voice yelling a speech to the fighters. Fucking lungs still hurt,” she grunted, turning aside casually to cough into her handkerchief. He noticed the reddish tinge on her lips and suppressed a wince, pushing Snow out of his mind easier than he’d thought. Because this was Johanna, and he realized, only slightly startled, that unquestionably she mattered more than Snow terrified him. The freezing dry winter air, and the exertion, had done her no favors. His own side and shoulder hurt like hell, and he felt in total sympathy with Johanna, since his tightly-bound broken ribs also made deep breathing its own agony.

“Ah,” Coin said, nodding. “I can’t say I readily approve of you going to an unsecured location—“

“Not like Thirteen’s apparently all that safe either now that Snow’s targeting it,” Johanna returned neatly, keeping her voice almost unnaturally low and even to help keep it from irritating her lungs. Haymitch resisted the urge to throw up his hands and tell her to stop poking the damn tiger already. “Get Beetee and Wiress to put up the usual forcefield around the winter town to repel firebombs. If the Capitol comes anywhere—even Thirteen—with nukes, that’s the end of everyone. Won’t make a difference whether I’m here or there or anywhere.”

“True,” Coin said. “Although it’s certainly more secure here—look what happened to you out in an unsecured district.”

“Eh, and someone could strangle me to death in Thirteen if they really wanted,” Johanna pointed out dryly, with the sort of dark, flippant humor that only those who’d been walking that razor’s edge of their own death could manage.

“Point is,” Haymitch cut in, trying to keep things flowing, “the district’s in particularly rough shape, and if these people aren’t tended to—especially the ones just past reaping age—you’re losing some of the best possible fighters for when the spring campaign comes back up. They’re tested, mind. All managed to fight back against Peacekeepers already and survive out in the woods for months. Plus if the Capitol has it in mind to keep bombing Thirteen through the winter, it’s probably better that Johanna’s not there. Or,” his mind deftly made the leap, “the hub of the Peacekeeper intel network. Should worse come to worse…best to not have all the coal in one cart, I’d say, given the Capitol’s proved they’re trying to step it up.”

Coin stared at him for what seemed like endless moments of silence. “And I suppose you want to tell me—and thus Heavensbee—that there’s some propaganda value here as well.”

He debated that for a moment, and let it drop. “No,” he said. “We don’t trumpet it nationwide that she’s out here in Seven. No point painting a target on her back for bombers or assassins. The war’s already started and it won’t stop until we either win or lose. The districts still under occupation don’t need Phoenix propos to get them ready to take their chance if it arrives. They just need to know we haven’t forgotten them while they wait for that chance.”

“He’s right. I think it’s better I start to fade out quietly,” Johanna said, shaking her head. “I’ve told ‘em all it’s their war for them and theirs, not because I told them to fight back. I’ll join whatever fight there is come spring, but not as their supposed figurehead or whatever. And maybe I can do more helping the intel network in the meantime, especially if the intel runners move out here.” 

Coin nodded at that. “I doubt they’ll take kindly to your seeming demotion and leaving Thirteen, though. People will want an explanation if it’s noticed, or they may think it’s due to some kind of ill feeling. We can’t afford to have the appearance of a schism in our forces, Abernathy.” He noticed she didn’t call Johanna _Phoenix_.

“Tell them she’s taking the winter out in Seven to recover—they all know she and I were in the hospital—and to help rebuild things. It’s only the truth. Plus it looks good for helping shore up relations with other districts, as opposed to her hid—staying in Thirteen all winter.”

“Hell, I’ll give you an announcement if you want,” Johanna muttered.

“I don’t know that will prove necessary.” Coin rubbed her chin, jaw moving slightly sideways in a momentary grimace. “Medical supplies are rather more limited after the attack, of course, but we can spare some for your worst cases. Prioritize the treatment of fit, young citizens who can fight come spring, of course. It’s fortunate your combat injuries are so low. Food, however, easily can and will be arranged, and Seven will join the regular supply runs. I’ll extend the offer to your victor allies as well if they wish to come join you in Seven on the hovercraft. Naturally, I expect a routine weekly report from you as district liaisons, and regular contact from Colonel Fog and the intelligence network. Expect the hovercraft sometime late tomorrow.” He nodded at that, prepared to hang up. “Oh, and one further note,” Coin added, almost as an afterthought. “It seems Odair took an opportunity in the confusion of the bombing to escape. He hasn’t been relocated, which means he’s either one of the as-yet-unidentified casualties, or else he’s out in the wilds somewhere.” With that, Coin hung up on her end.

Haymitch stood there with the uneasy sense of having gotten essentially everything they’d wanted from that conversation, but not trusting it. Apparently Johanna agreed.   
“That was easy,” Johanna said, half-turning and looking over her shoulder at him, eyes narrowed with suspicion, chewing at her lower lip briefly. “ _Much_ too easy.”

He gave a politely derisive snort of amusement, watching as she slipped the commpad back into its protective sleeve, then into her bag. She sat down heavily in the chair he’d vacated, looking as exhausted as he felt, sagging shoulders and momentarily half-bowed head. “Darlin’, I’m pretty sure she wanted it to sound like you insisted on her letting you leave.”

“Despite her reluctance to see me leave, out of a pure desire to protect me, of course.”

“Naturally.” He shook his head. “I think she wants you out of Thirteen, and out of the Phoenix role, so you can’t challenge her so easily on things. Here in Seven, and painting yourself as just another fighter, you have to ask her nicely for things. She and Thirteen have all the power again.”

“Also why she’s willing to let all the victors walk out as well, I’m sure,” she said with a nod. “We’re the only people there who can challenge the system at all and demand things. We leave, she’s firmly back in charge of the district, and the war effort. Or so she thinks.”

“Or so she thinks,” he agreed. There was only so long one small center could keep control of the larger population, and the districts hadn’t taken to the Capitol yoke too well. “I don’t know exactly what her plan is, but I’m damn sure she’s got one.” He had the feeling the people of the districts wouldn’t let Johanna go that easily, and being able to get his parents and hers as a coup as well. Not just personally, either—having the Peacekeeper network centered out here meant Coin depended on their goodwill to keep that cooperation. She must have realized that was a bargaining chip she’d have to sacrifice. “That last bit, though…”

“What, was that meant as a warning?” She gave a single darkly amused chuff of laughter, cutting it short and breathing in deep after, gloved hands gripping her arms as she suppressed yet another cough. Dammit, did they even have some kind of cough suppressant here in Seven? It had been so long since he hadn’t had a well-stocked medicine cabinet in his house, or the infirmary supply in Thirteen, so he had to think back to long-ago days. Thin, hungry end-of-winter days where his ma had only hot water and a small dab of honey when he was a kid to offer against a cough, because cough syrup at the apothecary was just one more thing that was too pricey. Except when he or Ash were really sick, suddenly a bottle surprisingly showed up, and no question now that it had been Fog doing it on the sly. “You really think if Finnick’s on the loose he’s going to cross half the country—in winter to boot, Four boy that he is—just to come try and kill us again?” 

“If Snow managed to get murdering us to be that deeply urgent with him, he’d have tried to kill us on sight rather than waiting his time,” he reassured her wryly. “I think I’m gonna have to wait and ask Fog what’s up with that whole situation, since you and I were totally out of that loop.” Still, he had the eerie feeling that even knowing confidently Finnick wasn’t turned into a mindless, relentless murder-machine, he wouldn’t sleep that well some nights with the notion of a vengeful Finnick out there. Another nightmare thing haunting the darkness of his nights, along with the nocturnal mutts they’d let loose back in the Second Quell. 

“Wherever he is,” she said softly, “I hope he’s all right.”

“Yeah.” That seemed the only thing he could say, wishing in a way that they’d seen Finnick before they’d left. Whether that was for the answers it might provide, or just to say goodbye in case they didn’t return, there was a sense of something incomplete nagging within him. He reached out and put a hand on her arm. “Let’s get you over to your house,” he suggested gently, trying his best to not sound like he was pandering. Truth was that he needed the rest just as much as her, and she probably saw it. “Nothing more we can do here for now, and that cough is getting bad.” 

Pulling her scarf up over her nose and mouth again, she nodded. “Might as well go see how bad the place is after five months away,” she said with the air of grim humor. “We’ll let everyone else go home too, and we’ll start tackling organizing the problems soon enough.” Already his mind started to roll along with that, imagining the logistics of medical triage, food distribution, and the like. Even something simple as the likely possibility that the Capitol would almost immediately cut the electricity now that Seven had fallen to rebel forces, and they’d have to—what, cut firewood? It would be firewood here, wouldn’t it, not coal like it would be back in Twelve, and they’d probably have to send some loads of firewood to their allies as well. Nine and Ten for sure, with as far north as those districts spanned, and even Eleven and Four, far in the south, got cold enough that they’d need the occasional nighttime fire. 

He closed his eyes, weary beyond words, not wanting to even think about all that. They’d been kicked out of the hospital too soon to come take care of this. Normally a detailed problem to solve like that would appeal to him, set his blood and his mind racing with the challenge and all its many facets. Right now, he didn’t have the physical or mental energy. He wanted to just get inside somewhere out of the bitter winter chill that made his wounds and everything else ache, kick off the stiff winter boots that had blistered his feet thanks to wearing too-thick socks that had folded up in wrinkles, and maybe drink some coffee—no, he amended, he’d rather just crawl under the covers with Johanna warm in his arms, and sleep for a few days. He certainly didn’t feel much like eating given the lingering ache in his guts.

Walking half a mile from Peacekeeper HQ up the hill to Victors’ Glade, tired and ill, without a warm coat in the bitter cold, would have been up there among his more stupid ideas. But he wished soon enough they’d ditched the Peacekeeper coats anyway. The white fabric made them lodestones for attention as they passed through the streets—though a Seven celebration, he was amused to note, seemed as low-key as Twelve—but at least the red armbands they tied on, suggested by another Peacekeeper rebel as they exited HQ, avoided their getting attacked on sight. People from Seven approached, though, peering at the sliver of face on both of them visible between scarf and hat. Whether it was Johanna’s Seven coloring, or his Twelve looks, they obviously saw something that satisfied them, and given the lack of fuss, he didn’t think they’d identified their youngest victor dragging her Twelve victor husband with her. Or if they did, that stolid Seven nature meant they were considerate or discreet enough to not kick up a ruckus, though he didn’t see the wide, suddenly knowing eyes above ragged scarves that would have made him suspect that. 

Given the way Johanna held back at the turnoff to the hill as a small knot of people passed, and then hurried up when the coast was clear, almost stumbling in her haste on the icy path, he’d imagine she’d also seen a lack of recognition. And probably grateful too for being able to walk around so neatly hidden by a hat and scarf, appearing just another anonymous rebel Peacekeeper. He wasn’t naïve enough to tell her she shouldn’t sneak in, that she had nothing to hide from Seven. Old habits died so hard. He’d felt that impulse to slink in the shadows more often than not, to hide away and pray that nobody noticed him. At least simply not being noticed meant he wasn’t being pointedly ignored, or accused, or derided. So he followed her, glancing back over his shoulder and seeing nobody approaching in either direction. “You can slow down a bit, we’re clear, Hanna,” he reassured her, hearing the ragged pant in her breathing that he didn’t think was just exerting her strained lungs too hard in the cold. The last thing she needed right now was to be so stressed and overwhelmed it made her lose it. 

But they made it safely to the top of the slope. Victors’ Glade was the same setup as Victors’ Village, of course, and Victors’ Bayou in Four, for that matter—same semi-circle of twelve houses, two each in six different shades: white, blue, yellow, green, cream, and gray. The groundskeeper for the Village faithfully repainted the damn things every three years, like clockwork, never mind that eleven of them stood empty and Haymitch really couldn’t have given a shit about whether the pale blue paint looked pretty or not. One look inside his house and its descent into a disaster over the years would have told anyone that.

Through the familiar-looking wrought iron gate of Victors’ Glade set into a familiar-looking stone wall, Johanna led them along the left arm of the semicircle—of course, since only One, Two, and Four had enough victors to even start to fill in the right half of their victor housing. Calmer now, her steps slowed. “That was Buck’s,” she nodded to the first on the left, white with crisp black trim. 

Birch “Buck” Lyfong of the 6th Games, died just a few years back, which had caused Mags and Woof no end of grief to lose one of their last contemporaries. Haymitch knew his Games history far too well, learning it from those old legends as he had. “They assign ‘em purely based on order, you know,” he said. The white house to his right back in the Village was an unsettling ghost, one that had stood sadly empty since long before he was even born, because Nualla Clearly survived the 4th Games and then walked into the woods a few years later and never came back. But of course the Capitol wanted to proudly hand him a _brand new_ house, never lived in, like a shiny toy, and never mind the pointed absence of Nualla, or the ten other silent, empty houses.

“Cedrus,” she continued, nodding to the pale blue one that was virtually a twin to Haymitch’s, and at least Cedrus was safe back in Thirteen now, and the light on in the parlor window told Haymitch that Cedrus’ husband Matthias was there. It was such an odd sight, given every time he approached his own house, the lights were always off, and nobody home. He’d never had a chance to meet Matty Dallenbach, but they ought to go pay him a call tomorrow and update him on Ced. 

“Miller,” the obviously long-empty brown-trimmed yellow house belonging to Miller Nakata of the 30th Games, died of a vicious flu that swept through Panem back in the 36/37 winter, Haymitch far too young then to remember all the funerals in Twelve, and before Johanna’s time. 

“Blight—don’t know whether he and Clover will end up here on in Nine, I guess,” pointing to the green house with darkened windows but lacking that air of long-term abandonment, “and here’s me,” the cream one, trimmed with blue.

He couldn’t help but think of the Village, and how the white house to his left and the yellow house to his right were both empty now—they’d decided Katniss took precedence in victory order over Peeta and so they’d put her right next to him in the yellow house for the third victor. She’d hated that, though her being caught between him and Peeta seemed oddly appropriate in a way, the two different men whose lives she could choose as her own path—hope on her left, and hopelessness on her right. He’d never imagined she wouldn’t get the choice in the end.

Somehow he managed to turn the strangled sound that burst forth into something more like a bark of pain. It really was pain in the end, wasn’t it? Never mind that he was too damn old to burst into tears, and it would kill his aching ribs anyway, and why he ought to cry for one girl when he hadn’t let himself cry for forty-six others equally murdered by the Capitol—not like a single damn one of them had hurt less. 

Johanna fished the key out from under a flowerpot on the porch. “Not like anyone would break in,” she said dryly, looking back over her shoulder at him.

Silently, he nodded. Anyone breaking into a victor’s house to steal anything would have been an act of sheer insanity for anyone, almost guaranteed to end in execution. It would be seen as a greedy assault on the Capitol’s darlings, the Capitol’s generosity. “I left mine unlocked,” he told her. “Didn’t much expect to be back.” Whether that meant success and getting the rebellion started, or being exposed and executed, it hadn’t much mattered. He didn’t doubt that everything was just the way he’d left it last July, and it would be that way even without Romulus fucking Thread to enforce it. “You think maybe the Peacekeepers destroyed my place back in Twelve?” he asked with fake cheer as Johanna fumbled with the key. “Down with traitors, blah blah.” 

She gave a snort of amusement. “Nah, only if Snow ordered them to wreck the place. And he’d probably only do that looking for information.”

Haymitch shook his head. “I imagine that Snow knows I’m not stupid enough to leave anything on paper.”

She grunted in acknowledgment of that, pushing the stubborn door open with her shoulder. Flipping the light switch next to the door, she commented, “Well, saw it at Ced’s, but looks like the power’s on here too—for now,” as the warm glow illuminated the front hallway.

He stepped inside, scuffing snow from his boots on the mat, pulling down the scarf as he did so. It was familiar, the exact same floor plan as his own house—he didn’t doubt he could have found his way around the place in the dark of night with ease. Yet visually it was slightly different enough to be disconcerting. He’d felt the same in Katniss and Peeta’s houses. Different colors on the walls, different woods used, as if dressing the thing up slightly different made it any better, or other than what it was—a pretty cage for the Capitol’s newest killer curiosity.

He could see a thin layer of dust on the dark wood of the stair bannister, and dust motes drifting in the air like bizarre snowflakes. The house was chilly—of course Johanna hadn’t had the heat on back in July, she’d have had air conditioning on if anything. There was a slight musty scent, and with that and the winter chill, his mind conjured up last winter, when Hazelle had opened up rooms he’d kept closed off for years in order to clean them. The house had filled with that scent, a sad, faint odor that spoke of dust and decay and emptiness. _I didn’t do all that well by you, Haze,_ he thought, the misery swelling in him again. But he’d do better by Vick and Posy.

He glanced around and just felt even more tired at the thought of the scrubbing and cleaning and airing out to be done. And from the look of it, Johanna’s house wasn’t a mess like his had been, unable to muster even the effort to care anymore. How the hell too-thin, too-tired Hazelle had managed to tackle his place was beyond him, aside from sheer desperation. She probably would have done anything at all to keep her kids fed—cleaned for a man she probably secretly loathed, a rich man who couldn’t even be bothered to clean his own house or do anything except drink obsessively. She’d cooked for him when he’d played helpless because it gave him the excuse to insist she take the leftovers home. Chances were she even would even fucked him, if he’d wanted it and paid her. _Maybe I should have asked her,_ he thought again, eyes suddenly stinging. Not to fuck him, but to marry him. She probably would have accepted, especially as he’d have assured her he’d never, ever expect sex from her. Dignity and her own personal feelings readily sacrificed in the name of her kids’ safety—he knew she’d have done it. 

It seemed too pitiless that the Seam would give her the mantle of respect as his long-suffering, bone weary cleaning lady that they would have denied her as his wife. But the world wasn’t a place with much pity. And he’d been so caught up in his own misery, and trying to keep the kids from accidentally tripping off any number of mines with their actions, and he’d convinced himself she was better off exhausted but still dignified. Maybe too, he’d been aware of how she wouldn’t have been able to refuse him: cleaning, dinner, sex, marriage, pretty much anything. Practically, yes, but also in that odd, intangible way, given he was her employer, her livelihood, her children’s survival. 

He’d been made so powerless for so long, had the will of others forced on him, that the idea of having power over anyone had sat uncomfortably. She couldn’t have refused him without fear of consequences, even if he never would have punished her for it—and how he hoped, foolishly and desperately, that she hadn’t believed that badly of him—but he’d always know it had never been her choice to make.

Besides, Snow would have murdered her after the Quell either way, whether as Briar’s sister or as his wife. No, better that he’d left her with her dignity intact. 

He felt the light touch on his arm and spun abruptly on his heel, half-expecting to see Hazelle’s heart-shaped face and her quiet, thoughtful deep grey eyes, her black hair bound back in a tight bun, telling him she was heading out for the night, as she always had. But no, Hazelle had never touched him. It was Johanna, of course. He let the thought of Hazelle fade. He and Johanna might have married out of practicality and desperation, true, but at least it was equal on both their parts.

Johanna didn’t ask if he was OK, awkwardly calling attention to his zoning out. Chances were she knew he wasn’t, and simply accepted that he’d talk about it if he wanted, and he felt a surge of gratitude towards her for it. “Got some work to do,” she said instead, gesturing around her. Then she sneezed violently, and quickly pulling the scarf up again before he could urge her to do it with all the dust around them. Last thing they needed was her coughing up more blood.

He shook his head tiredly. “Let’s get the bedroom cleaned up, maybe get some tea in you for that cough, and call it a day.” He wasn’t even hungry right now.

Trudging up the stairs behind her, he saw how she seemed almost shy and hesitant as she paused at the first door on the left. The same one he’d taken, he noted; the one closest to the front door, and to escape. The master bedroom, at the end of the hall, had probably belonged to Petra and Gunnar, just as Haymitch had insisted his ma take that one back at his house. But it was different sharing a room in Thirteen, neutral turf to them both. This was her house, her room, and he was the unfamiliar piece of the puzzle coming into her territory, and he tried to be mindful of it.

So he didn’t poke around, or even look around curiously, trying to ignore the little bits of clutter and dirty laundry left there, stepping over a pair of trousers left on the floor as Johanna muttered, “I didn’t see much point cleaning up, that last night…” 

“Don’t have to explain it to me, you know,” he said with a thin-lipped smile, oddly grateful she’d never see his house as it had been. Embarrassed over a little dirty laundry? Ha.

“Yeah, yeah,” she muttered, ducking out of the room, presumably to get to the linen cupboard out in the hallway bathroom. She came back with an armful of sheets, scented with that same vaguely spring-ish scent that was the Capitol’s stock fabric softener to its victors, delivered like clockwork to his house for the past twenty-five years in that regular delivery of luxuries unavailable on the market. No lye soap and raw knuckles for victors.

It was the little things that first winter alone, like staring at the heap of laundry soap and shampoo and dishwasher detergent and fabric softener and other things growing every month, quantities probably fit for a busy family of four or six rather than one solitary sixteen-year-old boy. He found he couldn’t bear to have that shit keep piling up in his house mocking him with his aloneness, he’d grown up thrifty enough he couldn’t bear to pour it out and waste it, and he couldn’t give it away to anyone in the Seam without getting them punished. So he’d finally swallowed the fear of even _appearing_ to reject anything from the Capitol, called Victor Affairs, and told them to please send that delivery only every six months, and after fifteen minutes of trying to figure out how to tell Yelena Farthingale that their little goodie basket reminded him too much of the family the Capitol took from him, and knowing she’d be relaying Snow’s chosen appointments for all the whoring out that would happen next summer besides, it was too much. He’d called her, true, but there she was so earnestly apologizing for the Capitol inconveniencing his life with _too much fucking laundry detergent_ , so he’d hung up, and at least been glad nobody was around to hear him scream. 

Making the bed with her, and then opening the window as they dusted off the furniture, he tried to shake that odd feeling that nagged him. It was familiar and unfamiliar all at once, a bit off in a way that wasn’t quite comfortable. Having someone else there, helping him smooth down the covers and slip the pillows into their cases, the awareness of another living being in a bedroom that was too like his own; and how the walls should have been pale blue—albeit a miserably faded pale blue after a quarter century—rather than the pale yellow Johanna had chosen, and the furniture was lighter in color, more of a bright cherrywood than the deep ebony he’d ended up with in his room. 

It was all just so slightly twisted askew from his long-established familiarity that it felt vaguely unreal, like he’d got caught up in some nightmare tracker jacker dream, or this was one of those dark visions he’d had in the hospital while on the rapid healing medication or the morphling. Or maybe he was dead drunk and passed out on his couch in Twelve. Or maybe even like all those dreams with that wife he wouldn’t turn to see, where the kitchen was his kitchen, but made bright and new again. Too much pressure crowding in on him, the echoes of Hazelle, the thought of Madge badly injured and the other kids further traumatized—those were familiar feelings, and he couldn’t _trust_ this place. Of course he could have dreamed this all up, that Johanna cared for him, that she’d kissed him, ever so briefly but sweetly, back up on that bluff. “Tell me I’m not crazy,” he heard the rasping catch in his voice, like the rough scrape of a pick against stone, as he turned to her.

It must have sounded totally apropos of nothing, but she put down the faded green rag she’d been using to dust the top of the dresser, faced him, and above her scarf, her eyes were steady and clear. “You’re not imagining this,” she told him. He could see a faint crinkle at the corners of her eyes, and could imagine her hidden smile. “Seriously, Hay, most people’s little escape-from-reality fantasies would be all about sex. Not dusting and both of us being beat half to hell.” She cocked an eyebrow, spreading her hands and pirouetting slowly in front of him. “Although—tell me, am I dusting either naked or wearing naughty underwear?” 

Looking at her long white Peacekeeper overcoat, worn open over her thick grey sweater, he couldn’t help but grin ruefully in acknowledgment. “Nah, you’d freeze,” he assured her dryly.

“So practical,” she drawled. She looked at him, shaking her head slightly. “Well, I don’t think we’re high on morphling, and I’m pretty sure I can’t be imagining you here either. If I’m imagining you in my bedroom, it’d be warmer in here, and you’d damn well better be naked.”

Giving her a quick chuckle for the teasing, grateful that she’d pulled him out of the spiral of his own uncertainty, he sobered quickly enough. If he thought about it, he could almost still feel her lips against his. She’d surprised him with that kiss, but it wasn’t unwelcome. It had felt right in that moment, but they’d both thought it might be the only chance. Now, in the aftermath, and with both of them out of the hospital and dealing with the shift in their reality, what did she expect from him?

He breathed in as deeply as he could, given the grinding ache of his ribs, held it for a moment, and then took the plunge. “Maybe by the time the weather’s warmer, yeah…but I think we have other things we need to put first for now,” he told her. Given they’d agreed back in the hospital that the time wasn’t right, he doubted things would have changed in the space of a few days, but like Aurelius was always saying, putting it out there clearly would do some good.

He tried to not tense, hoping she wouldn’t take it as a rejection. Those whiskey-brown eyes found his again. She nodded decisively, looking calm as a mountain pond. “We’ve got a lot of shit to deal with. Getting healthy again. The kids for sure—we haven’t been able to give them much time, and they just went through hell again. The district, of course.” She threw the dusty rag towards the laundry hamper and stepped past it, shutting the lid. “I’m not quite ready either, OK? But…I can’t always be the one making the move. I need you to want me, and show it. So, you kiss me when you’re ready for us to go somewhere with things. And when that happens, I’ll let you know if I still need some more time.”

“That’s fair.” Gracefully done, actually, and he relaxed. “Besides, we said we’d talk to Aurelius before we went anywhere with it.” He grimaced at the sudden realization of how everything had shifted. “Not sure how we’re gonna do that when he’s in Thirteen and we’re here.” Funny feeling as well to recognize just how much he’d come to rely on the damn shrink and his advice, and how good it had felt to actually believe there was something besides what he was—maybe not healed, but certainly better.

“May have to make the best of it with what he’s done for us already,” Johanna said with a sigh. “Or else call him up and hope Coin isn’t listening in, and not sure I trust that for a minute.” She glanced towards the door. “I don’t really want to go shopping today.” 

“Me either.” The sheer physical effort was bad enough to imagine. But the additional burden of facing her neighbors was too much. 

“You cleared for solid food yet?”

“Probably don’t want to risk it just yet.” He likely wouldn’t bounce back as rapidly as he had at sixteen, plus the gut injury was worse this time. Thankfully she didn’t ask for the gory details. She’d trained enough with the medics she probably didn’t need to ask. The last thing he needed, far away from medical care, was overdoing it on his still-finicky intestines and end up shitting blood. 

“Eh, I don’t really want to cook either. Think I might still have some cans of soup.” A few moments of silence, and she added awkwardly, “I tended to…hole up in here sometimes for a few weeks at a time.”

“Don’t need to explain to me,” he reminded her dryly. After he gave up the effort of cooking, after even food lost what pleasure it held, he’d often virtually lived on the likes of soup and bread when he bothered to eat anything. “I’m sure I can find them in the cupboards. You got some tea as well?”

“Rather have coffee, after being stuck in Thirteen again.”

“Tea,” he said firmly. “With honey—I know they send us that fancy honey in our goodie baskets.” 

“Tracker jacker honey,” she said mockingly. “Think Finnick would like that? Or maybe Ash or Heike, even?” Being back here, of course she’d think of her little sister again, still alive and out there in Twelve, according to Fog. Maybe he’d even seen Heike Mason sometime this last year, and not known it. It seemed like a cruel irony.

“I’m not your enemy here, Hanna,” he reminded her.

Her shoulders sagged. “I know,” she said it in little more than a whisper. “It’s just…this place. Maybe I wasn’t ready to come back.”

“I know. But we’ll make the best of it.” 

Her pots and pans were exactly the same as his, and in the same cabinet to the right of the sink. He had to dig around in the cupboards to find the soup and tea and honey, though, and that small change from his own kitchen, and the green walls, actually helped rather than made him unsettled. He heard the sound of her digging around somewhere—probably one of the first-floor storage closets, to judge from the location. Trusting she’d yell if she needed him, or that he’d go check on her if things suddenly fell uncomfortably silent for too long, he lit the stove and put some water on for the tea.

He put a pot of water on the stove to heat for the tea, and turned back to the assortment of cans he’d put on the counter from his rummaging. Strangely relieved to not see lamb stew there, to not have one more little reminder of Katniss here, he popped open a can of tomato-basil bisque and dumped it into another pot. He heard Johanna’s footsteps heading towards the parlor.

He’d set the table with the tea and soup and she hadn’t come back, so he went to go find her, stepping through the dining room, into the open door of the parlor. Despite the thick coating of months of dust on the furniture, the pictures, and the like, he could see that it was a room cared for painstakingly and well maintained, the little touches speaking clearly to him: a book on a table bookmarked with a precious blue sugar ration chit, a sewing basket still by an armchair that he assumed had been Petra Mason’s with a heap of socks there, ready to be darned by a woman who’d grown up forced into such thrift that even victor wealth couldn’t change everything. He would say with confidence Johanna kept this parlor frozen in time the way it had been when she came back from the Capitol. He looked at those small signs of life, of the year that the Masons had been here lovingly preserved, and thought about the boxes left never unpacked, in the rooms that would have belonged to Ash and his ma, boxes left moldering behind locked doors for twenty-five years after that terrible day. Seeing this house, the bones of it identical to his, but the soul so very different, made him ache in a curious way. This house was sad, wistful; but it was the absence of something beloved and deeply remembered rather than the blank void that his house had become.   
Johanna’s house had been a home for a short time, and he saw that loss was keenly felt eight years later. His house had never been anything but a solitary prison to him, to the point where as the depression deepened, he couldn’t even care to keep it clean and pretend it all mattered, because nothing had mattered. 

He didn’t look again at the months of dust on every surface and the particles drifting lightly through the air like odd snowflakes, or the mending basket and the book and all the other little touches left lying there for years. He looked instead at Johanna on the floor, cross-legged beside a cardboard box full of carved wood figurines. “What’s that?” he asked.

“New Year’s stuff,” she answered, carefully unwinding another little bundle to reveal a small wolf.

She’d told him about Seven’s holiday customs: how the family hand-carved wooden ornaments and decorated a tree that they took ahead from their firewood quota, handing them down through the generations. He’d told her about Twelve’s singing for neighbors and lighting a candle. Neither of them mentioned the fact they hadn’t done those traditions for years. They hadn’t had to say it. 

Undoubtedly, that box had sat in the closet since the winter of 66/67. Now she’d carefully unearthed it, unwrapped each ornament with gentle hands, and the amber glow of wood in the winter sun as warm as it must have been all the winters the Masons had pulled out that box for New Year’s. “We could get a tree cut tomorrow,” he told her, sensing how much it meant to her that it happen. This New Year’s, whether or not the district accepted them, she had a family again.

She shook her head, giving that single-note chuckle again, “Ah, c’mon, look how exhausted we are already. You really think we’re in good enough shape to go tromping through the woods and dragging a tree back?”

Probably not, and given the space, he’d as soon spend the next few days simply sleeping and recuperating, though they wouldn’t get that luxury. But that tree mattered to her, he could see that, and Madge, Peeta, Posy, and Vick might not be from Seven, and Lindy so young she wouldn’t easily remember it, but this was their family now too, and to do something for the holiday, especially after the hell they’d all been through in the last weeks, seemed too important. “So…could we get someone to do it for some sugar or the like?” he offered. “Or some liquor, since we probably ought to clear out what you’ve got?” 

Different thing to have those bottles of whatever booze was in the cabinet when it was just Johanna there, and different for him than all those unbearable days of solitude and no hope and no purpose, but even with the war stalled out for the winter, there would be more than enough stress dealing with everything here in Seven, and here in the house, that he didn’t want to test his resolve to stay sober that closely. Not to mention two little kids, a preteen who probably would be going through the curiosity phase, and two traumatized teenagers who could too easily turn to it as a crutch, best to just not have the risk there—and really, they might as well trade it for something useful rather than just wastefully dumping it down the drain.

She smirked just a little at that, “Practical _and_ shrewd—knew I loved you for a good reason.” He laughed, kept laughing, ignoring the ache it put in his abused ribs, and slipped his arms around her, savoring the feeling of holding her as he’d never held another human being back in his own house in Twelve. “Have to teach you to hold a knife so we can carve something together for the tree. First New Year’s married and all. It’s a tradition.” 

He felt feeling the keen, electric thrill of mingled fear and excitement at that, at everything underlying her words. But he managed to give her a snarky smile instead and the offhand comment, “I’m pretty good with a knife. You didn’t notice?”

“We’re talking about carving wood, Haymitch,” she answered dryly, but she gave him a wolfish grin in reply.

“Taught myself over a couple of winters,” he countered her swiftly. “There’s a whole chess set back in Twelve that I made. Figured if I could carve people that well, I could probably carve wood.” He loved how she could laugh at that and not think he was a monster for needing that bleak, dark humor to cope. He also wouldn’t tell her that he’d messed with woodcarving even before that, about the pendant he’d carved for Briar long ago. That had no place between them. “Anyway, soup’s ready,” he told her, gesturing back towards the kitchen. “Let’s eat and get some sleep.” 

They’d clean up the parlor and put up that tree, the kids and their parents would be here tomorrow. For now, this winter felt like a gift: if they were all a little scarred and battered for losses and traumas, they had these months away from the fight to let some of the mental and physical scars heal and to knit them all together in a way they hadn’t before, with the war demanding all his and Johanna’s time and attention. They’d find some way to make their broken bunch of lonely refugees into an actual family, and breathe life back into this house and make it a home once again rather than a sad, lonely reminder of too many empty years. It wouldn’t come easy, but for the first time in a long while, he actually felt the spark of something he could only call hope.


	40. Chapter 40

She woke suddenly, jerked awake from sleep like a fish yanked from the river on the sharp barb of a hook. The low groan sounding in her ear startled her, blood racing as she pushed away, tried to turn over, disoriented and terrified, and then she heard the rasping plea, “Don’t…dammit, _please_ …”

Heart still pounding, body still keyed up, her mind calmed down. She couldn’t see him in the blackness of the night, but she recognized the voice. Haymitch, having a nightmare—although she couldn’t remember him being this bad back in Thirteen. Then again, Harcourt still prescribed him sleep capsules for the roughest days, and she’d seen him taking them sometimes, the days that left him looking haggard, and fuck knew they’d been through so much worse than that over the last few weeks. 

She reached out, hand on his shoulder and giving him a hearty shove, well aware it was better to just knock him awake quickly and then get the hell out of the way. Being gentle and trying to shake him awake carefully hadn’t worked. She’d barely avoided getting clocked right in the jaw when she tried. Whatever nightmares chased him, they were ones of horror, ones that made him wake up ready to fight desperately.

So as soon as she shoved him, she scuttled away out of easy reach, saying his name sharply as she could through her still-touchy lungs. Hearing the sudden gasp of indrawn breath, and the eerie stillness after, no small creaks of movement from his side of the bed, obviously he’d snapped out of it. “You up?” No point asking if he was OK—stupid question.

He took his sweet time answering, but his voice was level as he replied, “Yeah.” She settled back down beside him, pulling the covers back up. He gave a sarcastic bark of laughter. “You’re never worried that I’m gonna try to strangle you in y—“

“Stop it,” she cut him off, not in the mood for him to cut himself down. “Look, you just woke up this time, all right? No flailing. It’s getting better.”

He didn’t respond to that. She lay back down, head on the pillow that months of Thirteen’s thin, hard pillows and rough living on the warpath made feel far too soft and squishy. “What was it?” she asked finally.

Silence again. She heard a dog barking out in the frosty winter night—must have been one of the town strays nosing around the Glade. “Was back in the arena,” he said, so softly she barely heard him. “But it was the jungle, so this Quell arena, not mine. But it was Maysilee Donner down on the ground bleeding out, and then Katniss, Finnick, the kids, all my tributes from Larkspur and Dean on up…you, you were in there too. And me, I’m standing right there, stuck behind this forcefield—” A harsh and angry sound, half a snarl, “Just _watching_ it happen. Beating my hands raw on the forcefield, throwing everything in there with me at it, but it all just bounces back at me till I’m this raggedshit mess. All wounds and broken bones. I’m trapped, can’t do a fucking thing but watch the dying happen.”

Shit—she wasn’t good at this, the whole comforting thing. But he’d offered her that honesty, vulnerable as it was. She moved closer, reached out, and her hand on his shoulder was gentler this time. “Hey, I’m not Aurelius, but don’t think I need a fancy education to figure out that one.”

“Oh good,” he said dryly, “’cause I’d hate to be sleeping next to him. Really not my type, plus that weird feeling he’ll mentally dissect everything you say or do.” Hearing the snarky humor coming back into his voice, she couldn’t help but grin. But then his voice was serious, a bit thicker as he said, “It’s...I’m sorry…part of it’s being here.”

It stung to hear it at first, feeling like an insult to the place she’d lived. But she wouldn’t lash out at him when he was that vulnerable. She cringed now to think that she would have months ago. “How so?” she asked, keeping her voice level.

“It’s too much like Twelve, but the furnishing’s different, of course, so it’s all just off enough…” His voice trailed off. “

“That why you asked if you were imagining shit?” She hadn’t quite placed it, wondering if he was having a bad reaction to something or maybe he’d gotten hit in the head during the brief battle at HQ. but the raw desperation in his voice as he’d pleaded with her to tell him he wasn’t crazy could have had no other response but to reassure him. 

“Yeah.”

Now it finally struck her what she’d roped him into by making such a rash proclamation. Not his home, not his people—hell, he didn’t even have pajamas to wear and had just kept his undershorts and undershirt on. They’d have to buy him—and the kids—clothes on Market Street tomorrow so he even had something to wear besides Thirteen grey. She just hoped like hell that the Schneiders even had some clothes in stock with Eight cut off from resupplying them, but at least money was no object there. “I shouldn’t have spoken up for you.”

He laughed harshly, a tearing, painful sound. “No. No, it’s all right. Gets us the fuck out of Thirteen, and the kids too.”

“Would it have been any better if this was Twelve?” 

“Doubt it. Twelve was in bad shape by Reaping Day and I doubt another six months helped that much. And…at least your family lived here. It was a home. Easier to make it one again, see? Mine was never that. And I’d just be looking next door all the time…”

Katniss: of course. “They’re alive,” she reminded him, needing to pull him back from drowning in the guilt and grief over one dead girl when there were five living kids who needed him—herself as well. It wasn’t selfish to not want the best of him to be tied to the dead, was it? “And we’ll have all winter to look after them.”

“We left them,” he said softly. “We had to, sure, but if any of ‘em had been killed in that bombing…if Madge isn’t OK…we’ve got responsibilities to the war, but they’ve all of ‘em been left once already by parents. So we’ve gotta do better here. We’ve been fair caretakers—when we’ve been there. But they need more.” 

“Yeah.” Not much else she could say, since she agreed. They had to shuffle their priorities, but at least this created a chance for it. Scooting right up against him, she put an arm around him, feeling him relax into her touch slowly. There was still that moment he had, as she did sometimes too, of freezing at a touch, at so long having been without a kind touch that he’d forgotten how to naturally accept it. Here in the dark, instincts were more easily laid bare. She had the absurd desire to reach up and stroke his hair, touch his face, but kept her hand where it as, resting lightly on his back, not wanting to push too far. “Time yet before morning, and we’ll worry about all of it then,” she told him. “Go back to sleep.” Maybe it was a bit selfish too. She couldn’t stand if he got her thinking about all of it and it overwhelmed her, exhausted as she was. 

She heard the deep sigh, or maybe just letting out a breath he’d been holding, and his arm went around her too, and she gratefully let herself sink into that feeling of being cared for by someone. “Thanks,” he told her gruffly.

She woke alone, and for a few moments the sound of running water in the bathroom disoriented her—nobody ought to be in her house but her. But then reality settled, and her wary instincts eased off. She flung back the covers and padded over to find him in the bathroom, already showered and wrapped up in a towel, carefully shaving. “I used Beetee’s scrambler, messed up Snow’s bugs. Should have thought of it last night,” he said, shaking his head irritably. “But we’d been away from all this for months, so…” 

“I doubt Snow’s devoting as much time to being a creeper and listening in to victors’ houses anyway these days.”

“Hopefully. Quicker Thirteen delivers that forcefield equipment and we get this place safe from firebombs, the better. Anyway, found the shaving stuff and some toothbrushes and the like shoved at the back under the sink. Figured you wouldn’t mind—it was all unopened.”

“You know how they send too much shit in the supply packages, and once I got home that summer…” And after she thought Bern was dead, she hadn’t really gotten rid of even something as simple as the last of his new razors and shaving cream, because that would be making it all too real. The master bathroom attached to her parents’ room was a place she hadn’t even touched since then. Who knew how much stuff her mom and dad had left in there?

He nodded slightly, wild locks of black hair straggling over his forehead, eyes still on the path of the razor tracing the curve of his cheekbone. She could see the ugly purple starburst on his left shoulder in the mirror, from the shot to his shoulder—worse looking than her own wound, but then, it hadn’t been an injury to vital organs, so of course Thirteen wouldn’t have prioritized it. “Shoulder’s stiff?” She’d noticed he used the left arm only gingerly.

“Yeah,” he said. “Cold ain’t helping. Good thing I’m right handed.”

Shrugging out of her undershirt, she fumbled with the bandaging around her still-sore ribs, covering her chest entirely. Right now she couldn’t even wear a bra because of it—not that her sore, abused chest muscles and broken ribs would enjoy the contortions to fasten one anyway. “They strap you up too for some busted ribs?”

“Probably not as bad as you.”

Kicking off her underwear, she stepped into the shower, turning the water on and leaning into the warmth of it with relief as it soothed her aches. “Yeah, well, pretty sure we’ve got some bandages around here.”

“I’ll go look.” Scrubbing up as best she could, she debated yelling and asking him to scrub her back, but no—it seemed too weirdly intimate right now. Besides, he hadn’t asked her to help him, and the odd sense of negotiating the delicate steps forward in this dance between them made her uncertain. Damn caution, her usual mentality, wouldn’t cut it here. He mattered too much for that.

She’d have to go shopping, though, and get him some clothes, and both of them some food. She could ask him to come with, though. She wasn’t alone anymore, ready to make her shopping as quick an ordeal as possible and then retreat back to the house; too easy to fall back in old mental ruts. 

He’d put his trousers on by the time she got out of the shower, and obviously he’d found some of the first aid supplies the Capitol had sent, since he had a pile of neat packages of bandages as he busied himself ripping open the sterile packages, and a pot of the ice-heat pain relief cream. Good idea: it wouldn’t do much for the broken bones and deep twinges in her lungs, but for the widespread muscle aches that just made it all suck harder, it’d help.

She managed to snag a pair of clean jeans and underwear from the dresser and put them on, and laid a warm, soft pale blue sweater aside, though she felt weirdly compelled to clutch the damp towel to her chest as she sat down beside him. Six months ago she’d stripped down in front of him and Peeta and Katniss in the elevator like it was nothing at all, and further fucked with Katniss’ prudery by going topless in the wrestling ring of the Training Center. She’d thought nothing of flaunting her body publicly and making everyone uncomfortable with it, so the sudden blush of shyness felt almost stupid. But then, her body had meant nothing to her. It was simply a tool, a weapon, and too, that previous Haymitch had looked at her in the elevator with a look of nothing but jaded amusement. Even in the CPC or their compartment’s bathroom in Thirteen, nudity had simply been functional, pressed for time as they were. But that was before everything had changed, before she’d actually wanted to look at him, and half of her wanted him to look at her, while the other half was self-conscious. 

Well, nothing gained by holding back, and her ribs hurt like hell. She put the towel down, and bit back a joke about him taking any excuse to get his hands on her. It was fine to make sexual wisecracks when they were both safe and level, but doing it half-naked like this, with him about to touch her—even if it was medical—was a level she wasn’t ready for just yet. 

He looked at her, seeing the red puckered crater high on her chest for the first time, and the bloom of dark purple and blue spread across her right breast and ribs like an ugly smear. “So much for wearing really deep necklines,” she muttered, reaching for the blue pain-relief goop and slapping a gob of it on the wound, and smearing it all around the bruised area gingerly. “Wrap me up, huh?” 

His hands were careful as he wrapped her ribs and chest. She felt that crackle of awareness between them all the same. The medics had been gentle, but it was a briskly professional kindness, and she’d seen him show that to others in the infirmary. This was something different. Not explicitly sexual, since he didn’t take the chance to grope, crack a joke about her nipples standing up in the chilly air, or “accidentally” brush a hand over her breast in passing. No hot, leering eyes staring at her and making comments about her body as she sat there for endless minutes, exposed and helpless— _you’re such a ripe little peach under all that prickly sourness, Johanna, I truly wish I’d been the first to take a bite._

Caught up in that memory of Augustus Aurum—why the fuck that night should come to mind, when several that first summer had been so much worse, so much more painful and degrading—she let out a gasp and stiffened, and immediately she heard Haymitch asking softly, “Too rough?”

“Not you,” she managed, heart pounding, shutting her eyes and trying to bite back the feeling of rising nausea. There was that sudden urge to turn to Haymitch, push him back on the bed, straddle him, and just fuck him furiously. Override that memory of Augustus’ probing eyes and roving hands and silky Capitol voice with something here and now, and feel something besides pain and exhaustion. _Right, and that makes him different from everyone else you used exactly how?_ She loved him. But it would be all about her fear, not love for him. Not to mention she really fucking hurt right now and the exertion of sex might make her want to just pass out. They’d had that conversation already. It was just getting out of the old, bad habits and ways of thought.

She felt the lightest brush of his fingertips on her shoulder, and then when she didn’t angrily shrug that off, the touch of his whole hand, lightly squeezing in reassurance and then letting go.

What he gave her wasn’t an impersonal gentleness or kindness—tenderness. That was the word, and unused as she was to it, she hadn’t easily identified it, as it made her breath catch in her throat for a moment as he finished the bandages and neatly tied them off. 

Safely covered now from midriff to armpits, she turned to him, seeing the wound on his shoulder, and the thick surgical scar on his stomach radiating out from the knot of the bullet wound there, the odd bald patch where they must have shaved the hair to be able to do surgery, the still dark bruising that matched her own. Letting him smear some ointment on the wounds, and then carefully bandaging him up, afraid to hurt him and keeping her touch as light as possible, she finally asked, “They had to open you up?” She gestured towards the area of the scar she’d recognized as a clean scalpel cut.

“Had to dig the bullet out. Odd trajectory up into my guts since it caught me when I was jumping towards you.” He shrugged awkwardly. “Screwed up a few loops of the intestine, busted a couple ribs, killed my spleen, apparently—“

“Ah, shit, who needs one a spleen anyway?” The fact he didn’t smile back and answer with an equal quip hit her with a pang of concern.

“And then it ended up in my liver—that was where a lot of the bleeding came from, they said. And while you were getting strapped up right before we went, I got a long lecture on how even out in the field with access to alcohol I’d better stick to sobriety since they’d gone to all the trouble of getting approval to give me a nice healthy young liver.”

“They…” Her brain hit full stop on that one. “They did a liver transplant on you?” 

“Apparently.” That awkward tension stayed there, shoulders and back rigid, and she wondered just how long he’d been keeping that to himself. “I mean, I wasn’t exactly in a position to argue. I was busy dying, then when I hit the operating table of course I was unconscious.”

She had the feeling it wasn’t the liver itself that bothered him, he was too matter-of-fact about things done for survival, and they’d both seen the Capitol do genuinely creepy shit to unconscious victors without any kind of medical necessity. “So what was it?”

“They said,” he spoke hesitantly at first, “the cirrhosis was bad enough I’d have been dead by forty-five the way I was drinking, maybe even sooner. Maybe they’re just trying to scare me straight by exaggerating it, but…” But it wasn’t his life he’d have worried about. Either it was thoughts of leaving her and the kids behind that haunted him, or else, imagining a world where he left Katniss and Peeta to fend for themselves not too far in the future. “So looks like you did me a favor by making me useful enough to Thirteen to deem me worth extra effort at keeping alive, and hey, Finn may have meant to shoot you first but looks like I did myself a favor making sure he got me before he got tackled.” There was the wry quip at last, and it hit like a poisoned arrow. 

She couldn’t joke back, couldn’t turn his defensive self-deprecation into humor. Reaching out, she wrapped her arms around him, telling him, “Cut it out with the ‘poor worthless me’ jokes. We need you to stay alive.” Compelled by honesty, she admitted, “I need you.” 

His arms went around her in turn, holding her equally close. It didn’t feel that odd to be there, skin on skin for the first time—or bandages on skin for some of it. Head resting against his shoulder, it felt right. “I know,” he answered her, voice hushed. “They didn’t have to scare me off the bottle, Hanna. I’ve got plenty of reason to stick around. I need you too.” 

At peace then, in no hurry to let him go, she let herself enjoy that moment, holding on to him, feeling his heart and his breath and the warmth of his skin, the gentle flex of his fingers on her back. She had no idea how much time passed by the time the tinkling, too-cheerful tone of the doorbell sounded, and that startled her out of that blissful private world. “Haven’t heard that shit in years,” she muttered, reaching for the blue sweater and tugging it on over her head in too much of a hurry, earning a twinge from her ribs for it. She heard Haymitch close on her heels as she headed for the steps. Glancing over her shoulder as she hit the small landing and the turn to the last four steps, she saw that he’d wrestled into his shirt, but no chance he’d have it more than half-buttoned, if that, by the time they hit the door. “Stay out of sight so they’re not thinking they interrupted us,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Fucking your husband, how debauched,” he teased, but she waved an arm at him impatiently, seeing he stayed on the landing.

She opened the door to see Matthias Dallenbach standing there, all solid six feet three of him bundled in his heavy winter coat, quiet woodland brown eyes peering at her from the thicket of his mostly-grey facial hair. “Morning?” she managed. He was more talkative than Cedrus, which wasn’t saying much, but she wouldn’t bet that she’d exchanged much more than a dozen words with him since that first year when he’d made polite courtesy calls to the family. Of course, her “everyone should fuck off” attitude probably had something to do with it. So she was surprised to see him standing there, given he hadn’t shown up on her porch in years.

“Brought you some muffins,” he said, handing over a basket still letting off wisps of steam from beneath a checkered napkin. “And since I heard you’re planning to stay at least through the winter, thought you and Haymitch might need to go to town and do some shopping this morning. Getting back into things for you, and for him to meet people, might go easier for you if I go with you.”

Used as she was to cryptic pronouncements and veiled words from people, it was a bit of a shock to hear open, blunt Seven speech. She saw the hint of anxiousness in Matthias’ eyes and finally placed it, just before he added, “And I’d like to hear how Ced’s doing.”

Fuck’s sake, nobody should have to beg for news of someone they loved. “C’mon in,” she said, standing aside. Her bare feet already started to feel the chill of the wooden floor, so she stepped onto the rug. “Or…shit, it’s dusty as hell in here, maybe we should…”

“Three minutes. I’ll go get our coats and boots,” Haymitch’s drawl came from further upstairs, where he’d already obviously headed back towards the bedroom. Grateful for that, but irritated she’d left him alone with Matthias, she glanced up towards his retreat for a second. Then it dawned on her that she’d left her to fend for herself here both because he trusted she could do it, and also because this was her fence to mend.

“Cedrus is OK,” she told him, well aware that had to be first, and saw the tightness of anxiety in his expression ease—mostly around his eyes, since that bushy beard and mustache covered most of the rest. “No worse for the wear for being in Capitol hands.”

“He’s a tough old nut, Ced,” Matthias murmured, lips curving up into a pleased, wistful smile.

“He’ll be here on a hovercraft later today.”

“Oh, hell, the house is a mess,” he complained, grimacing.

“He hasn’t seen you in months. You really think he’ll mind a few dirty dishes?”

The old man let out a bark of laughter at that, as Haymitch came back down the stairs, white Peacekeeper coat on, and Johanna’s good black winter coat and boots in hand, as well as a pair of thick wool socks. Apparently he had good instincts to know what drawer to dig in. “Good to meet you,” he nodded to Matthias, buttoning up his coat as Johanna hurriedly pulled the socks on, then the boots and coat.

“So you’re settling here. Not so easy to move to another district, huh?”

Haymitch raised an eyebrow. “Now, me, I was fluent in Twelve passive-aggressive sarcasm from an early age. But the Seven variety, admittedly not so much. Can we skip the cryptic warnings that I don’t belong here?”

“No, just making a statement of the obvious,” Matthias said with a shrug. 

“When people in Seven want to insult you, you’re smart enough to figure it out,” Johanna assured Haymitch dryly. 

He rolled his eyes at that. “Let’s go to town. I’m wearing the same damn underwear I’ve had on since leaving the infirmary.”

“Hey, I was wearing the same underwear for four days in the arena.” But she kept her tone light, making it a joke rather than a flung verbal dagger. 

His eyebrows rose in a magnificently sarcastic expression of astonished innocence. “Oh, was _that_ Seven passive-aggressive?”

“Kids,” Matthias grumbled good-naturedly, “can we go? I’ve gotta shop and then clean up the house, change the sheets and all.” She caught Haymitch’s eye behind Matthias’ back and comically waggled her eyebrows—so apparently Cedrus would get quite the homecoming. Apparently the urge didn’t quit just because people hit sixty or so. 

She locked the door behind her, and followed Matthias’ bulk down the hill, grateful that he’d been thoughtful enough to come get them. She said as such, and he replied, glancing over his shoulder, “Debated just buying you stuff and delivering it. Figured I could estimate his clothes size,” jerking a mittened thumb towards Haymitch, “but no good you two hiding out in the house, yeah?”

 _Oh, was that Seven passive-aggressive?_ But he’d called her out rightly, and she bit back her ire. “No, it’s gotta be different than it was.”

“They’re on your side, Johanna. Not saying it won’t be a little awkward, but I think they get why you pulled away.”

“They’d damn well better _get it_ ,” she said with an irritated snort. “Snow threatening to hurt anyone I dared to care about and make the entire district pay if I didn’t keep my mouth shut’s pretty fucking clear.” It was like the old, ugly Johanna was right there again, trying to surface. Probably because this was the one district she couldn’t easily bullshit, who knew her too well, and the unease threw her enough off balance to make her lunge for the old and familiar, even if it wasn’t right.

She glanced over at Haymitch, oddly silent, who spread his hands and shrugged slightly. She interpreted it as, _I’m not going to make you look, in your home district, like I think you’re too weak to handle it yourself._ Maybe with a side of, _I’m the outsider and keeping my mouth shut and getting a read on things here._ Great, she’d started to be able to read those silences of his.

“Yep. Anyhow,” after they climbed the steps to the elevated wooden walkways and Matthias paused at the first shop door, “you need anything here?”

She glanced at the painted sign for one of the two bakers in town. “I shop at Ulme Brown’s,” she said, shaking her head. “Mom always said her bread’s better.” Just one more thing she’d argued over with Petra long ago, calling her mom tightwad when Johanna had wanted nothing more than to drown her sorrows and fears with some of the Lam bakery’s fancy pastries they’d never been able to afford before. Although given what Petra had told her back in Thirteen about the boy who’d gotten her drunk and raped her when she was a teenager, and the odd distaste she’d always shown towards the Lams, Johanna had her own suspicions now about why the Masons always avoided shopping there. She also had the urge to throw an axe through Woody Lam’s glass shop window, even if it was his dad or one of his uncles who was likely responsible for it, and regretted every single purchase she’d ever made at that bakery after Petra was gone. But she’d clung to buying mostly from Brown’s out of nostalgia, a posthumous apology to her mom.

“She was a good woman, Petra,” Matthias said, voice soft. “We were classmates, you know. Weren’t best friends or the like, but we were friendly enough, especially our last couple years of high school. She had some rough years right around the time I started to figure out I wasn’t going to find a nice girl to marry—couple of misfits together. Happy to see she finally found something good with Gunnar. She was happy when I got together with Cedrus.”

She hadn’t known that—nine years back, had Matthias been coming to see an old friend and support her in the transition to the Glade, more than to pay a courtesy call on Seven’s newest victor? “She told me about what happened,” she said, nodding towards the Lams’ sign.

“Ah.” He somehow made a single word sound incredibly sad. Yeah, that confirmed it had been one of the Lam boys, and Petra had told Matthias.

“Petra’s alive, actually,” Haymitch broke into the conversation. She glanced at him. “Oh, let’s not tease him,” he said. “It’ll be odd enough for the whole place when your ma and pa show up on that hovercraft. Oh, and my dead ma too, since the Capitol made a big enough thing of it that nobody over thirty can forget ‘my tragic losses’.”

Matthias stared at both of them, head turning back and forth. “Short version, please?” he asked.

“Peacekeeper spies saved them and hid them away in Two,” she said, cutting it to the shortest version possible. “They’ve been pretending to be retired Peacekeepers and working with gathering intel on the Capitol.”

Matthias chuckled at that. “Damn. Did it all right under Snow’s nose, huh? And they’ve been planning a rebellion as well? Bold as a bare dick in a tracker jacker hive.”

“You Seven folks have a really bizarre idea of fun.” She resisted at urge to throw a snowball at Haymitch, but saw the gleam of merriment in his eyes and couldn’t help but grin. “Though I really should have suggested that to some of my patrons in the Capitol. Sounds weird and drug-trippy enough they’d have absolutely gone for it and ended up out of commission for the night.” 

Now she was the one laughing, despite the protest of her ribs and her lungs, because it was hilarious, in a way that could only be funny to those who’d seen Capitol perversions and drug fads close up. She actually could imagine it being the latest party trick for those weirdos. 

“Your brother and sister?” Matthias asked her.

“They saved Bern and Heike too—they’re out there in the field, posing as Peacekeepers.” Close enough. They couldn’t truly be Peacekeepers, not in their hearts and souls. She wouldn’t believe it of Bern at all, and Heike couldn’t be lost. No matter how the Capitol had fucked with her mind—but then the specter of Finnick rose, reminding her that she would have sworn up and down there was nothing the Capitol could ever do to him to put him on their side. Feeling sick, drowning in the thick dark morass of it, she felt Haymitch’s hand brushing against hers; obviously he’d been watching her carefully. Even with both of them wearing gloves, being not alone like that was enough to pull her back. She nodded slightly to him in thanks. “So, Brown’s?” she asked, gesturing a hand down the street to where Ulme’s bakery beckoned.

It was a surreal couple of hours. Seven, as ever, respected privacy enough to keep noses out of other peoples’ business, so she wasn’t crowded by people asking questions, fawning or insulting, getting in her space. Nobody directly approached them on the street or in the shops. She got polite nods and the like, and Matthias breezily treating his companionship of Seven’s most famous wayward daughter and her foreign Twelve husband who’d been an equal public disgrace as nothing remarkable seemed to set the tone.

She glanced at Haymitch now and again to see him watching with that pleasantly impassive expression, smiling and making a quip or a little small talk to shopkeepers and people that Matthias greeted, performing amiably as expected. But those silver-grey eyes coolly assessed everything, and that mind of his chewed through it all.

The tension in her eased as it went on, and nobody came to tell her she was a fraud and full of shit, or spit at her that she couldn’t just waltz in and act the hero because they knew better. It seemed more comfortable for everyone right now that she act like Johanna Abernathy, another ordinary Seven woman setting up house with her new husband, rather than trying to push the victor or the Phoenix on them. She’d told them the truth, but some things weren’t easy to grasp, and Seven wasn’t comfortable with open sympathy. It stung too much like pity. She’d rather they treat her as nothing remarkable anyway, not dwell on everything that had separated her from them. It was when they hadn’t known what to do with the victor the Capitol sold as a violent little psycho that it all fell apart. 

“Good thing your man’s stocking up now,” Mina Schneider remarked, shoving the stack of jeans, sweaters, flannel shirts and the like into two canvas bags, which Haymitch slung over his shoulder. “We raided the supply depots, of course, for the stuff they held back, but I don’t imagine we’re going to get restocked soon with Eight still in Capitol hands. And some of the ones who were out in the woods already came by this morning, needing some new stuff.”

“We’ll see what we can do about that problem come spring,” Haymitch remarked.

“Gonna worry about Seven first,” she reassured Mina, seeing the look on her face. “You still taking Capitol bills, or…”

Some of the shops had balked a bit at taking cash, given that Seven had just divorced itself from the Capitol yesterday and Capitol currency would presumably be worthless if the rebels won the war. But no better solution to be had, and given that Coin would presumably try to impose her quotas and rations on them soon enough with the supply lines, better Johanna offer them at least a semblance of choice rather than just claiming food and clothes in the name of whatever central government they didn’t actually have.

“Cash is still good,” Mina said, her messy shoulder-length ponytail coming loose from its binder. “Hell, at least you’re paying now. The woodswalkers couldn’t, losing months of pay as they did, but not like I was gonna tell them to go walk around in the snow naked. Not the way they looked. I don’t suppose your District Thirteen’s sending clothes either, or even plain cloth?”

“No,” she said, sighing. “Tightly run there. They’ve maxed out production already. Can’t produce enough cloth for them, plus Four, Seven, Nine, Ten, Eleven, parts of Two…”

“Yeah, I suppose not. Well, everyone’s just gonna be reaching for the ragbag this winter to patch stuff up. Business as usual,” Mina said with a slight shrug. Johanna tried to not assume there was a judgmental _We won, we should be better off than before_ attached to that.

Hauling back up the hill, Matthias waved goodbye for the time being, and they promised to come get him when the train was due down from the hills. Haymitch trudged upstairs to change, and she headed for the kitchen, putting the kettle on the stove. Might as well enjoy power while they still had it, before they’d be reduced to stealing a wood-burning stove from a house down from the Cut somewhere—she held no illusions the Capitol wouldn’t have Five cut off the juice in a hurry. No point making their enemies comfortable. She had no idea whether that meant the running water would go as well, and that thought made her wince. Thousands of people, all needing clean water—shit.

Cutting some slices of brown Seven bread, smiling a little to herself to imagine bread that actually tasted of something rather than the tasteless, dense Thirteen flatbread, she grabbed a jar of strawberry jam. Damn, she missed homemade apple or pumpkin butter. The kettle whistled its piercing shriek by the time Haymitch came back downstairs. “Tea, I hope?” he said carefully.

“I’m not drinking coffee, _Dad_ ,” she told him grumpily, though she had to admit the tea with honey last night had soothed her aching chest. 

“Any thoughts on a good place to establish an infirmary?” he asked, grabbing a slice of bread, slathering some jam on, and taking a bite. “That’s going to be high priority. Long-term care for a lot of those folks, more than a couple of apothecaries can handle, and you and I have some experience with making a field hospital thanks to Milltown.”

“Hopefully with less dying,” she said grimly.

He glanced up at her, eyes tired. “Some amputations for sure,” he pointed out. “Fuck. I should have asked Coin to send us a doctor. I mean, you and I can handle plenty of things, but…if it’s heavy surgery and the like…” 

“Have to do the best we can,” she said, suddenly feeling the weight of so many sick and injured descending on her, and Coin’s ruthless proclamation to prioritize the young fighters. She had the feeling the medical supplies, especially without Three to give ample supply, would be carefully calculated for a certain number of people. “Optimal projected outcome” or some crap like that, and everyone else would either recover on their own or it would be an “accepted rate of casualty.”

“Not really medicine when you’re just leaving people to die, is it?” she said irritably. “It was one thing in Milltown when there was no time, and some just _couldn’t_ be saved.”

“It’s another when there’s time and opportunity, if only you had the right tools, but someone from above is screwing you there.” His smile was faint, sharply sarcastic. “Unfortunately, we can’t either charm or fuck Coin into opening up the goodie bag any wider.”

She gave a snort of amusement. “You think she’d be more into you or me?” she quipped.

“Neither. There’s the type that’s this powerful figure all day and so they want to just let go when it comes to sex and have someone else take charge. I dealt with them all the time, you would have too if you’d been around longer. Then there’s the ones that don’t want anyone else to have the upper hand, even in bed. She’s one of ‘em. Snow is too.”

“Don’t suppose it’s too late to just lock them in a room together and let them kill each other?” He chuckled at that, leaning back in his chair, arm slung over the oak rail of the back. “Hay…what are we doing with her, really?” 

“Using her for what we need, but trying to keep her as far away from it as we can.” A blunt, alarmingly honest reply, but she appreciated him not mincing words. And now away from Thirteen, and without anyone else listening in, accidentally or deliberately, it felt good to say it openly. “The more I see of her, the more I’m convinced we need to get this war going again in spring, and then try to limit Thirteen’s involvement as much as we can. We need their guns, and with Three and Six out of play, we need their hovercraft and their medicine and the like. But I don’t intend to topple one tyrant just to stick another right in the same slot. She’s less decadent than Snow, but she doesn’t see people either. Just numbers. Things.”

Hearing him outline it like that, she shook her head. “Dangerous game you’re playing.” Trying to defeat Snow while using Coin but not embracing her too closely, and not letting her realize she was being shut out, couldn’t be easy. But if she’d trust any man to be able to keep that balance, it would be Haymitch.

“Much worse games to play, Hanna.”

Finishing the tea and some of Cedrus’ muffins, not in the mood for a full lunch, they started to clean the house up as much as fatigue would let them. She’d get her mom and dad to help clean out Heike and Bern’s stuff and move it to the attic to free up more space, but for the next few days, at least there were three unclaimed bedrooms that they aired out, changed sheets, and dusted. The girls would have to grab one, the boys another, and Haymitch’s parents the third. The thought of having eleven people in the house—she should have bought more food. 

Finally it was time, and it was a relief to grab her coat and get outside again, even with keeping her scarf over her face to cut the worst of the cold air from making her lungs seize. Down at the station, waiting for the kids to emerge from the train, she saw first as Cedrus stepped off, looking around, and that craggy, often grumpy face broke into a smile as he saw the person he’d obviously waited for—all those months in a Capitol cell, probably wondering if he’d ever see his husband again. Matthias standing there, a bear-like figure made even bigger in his winter coat, and she saw the love and relief mingled on Cedrus’ face just before the two of them kissed, holding on to each other with the quiet tenderness of long years rather than the overwhelming passion of youth. She smiled behind her scarf, unable to do anything else. Had to do a better job with her fellow victors in the future, she’d seen that already in Thirteen.

Blight and Clover were next, Ami and Alfie and Barl with them, Blight’s face alight as she’d never seen it as he gestured around, obviously excited to give all of them their first taste of District Seven. Those years she’d lived next door to him, the two of them barely exchanging anything beyond cursory words, and him living there withdrawn and awkward and made into a guilty, apologetic shadow of himself.

She saw it on Blight’s face, Cedrus’ face—that expression of an almost luminous joy, of finally having cause to hope and someone to share it with, and it stayed with her. Men she’d lived next door to for years, but they’d all kept to their own secrets and brooding—a good Seven respect for privacy—and seeing them today with these new facets shining bright, it seemed she’d never really known them at all, readily dismissing them as a timid useless coward and a gruff cranky old bastard as she had. 

She glanced back over her shoulder at Haymitch, watching all of it too. Reaching over, she slipped her hand in his. For a long Seven had been just the place she lived simply because it was here or the Capitol and no chance she’d give the Capitol that much more control over her, that much more of her, but she realized then with a sudden swell of emotion just how much she’d missed that feeling of belonging—of home. And maybe, just maybe, they and the kids could find that again.

As she waited for the familiar sight of Peeta’s ash-blond hair, being as he was the tallest of the kids, she got thrown from it by Haymitch’s voice in her ear, low and almost too matter-of-fact in a way that told her how unsettled he was. “Now, I know you and I were wondering how we’d deal with not having therapy sessions anymore and I _did_ say something about really wishing Coin would send a doctor, but what I can’t figure is why she’d send Roarke Aurelius here?”


	41. Chapter 41

_I did say something about really wishing Coin would send a doctor, but what I can’t figure is why she’d send Roarke Aurelius here?_

A damn good question, and Johanna couldn’t readily come up with an innocuous answer, but Aurelius would have to wait. From the corner of her eye she saw Haymitch spare him a small acknowledging nod, but they were here for people who weren’t the Thirteen shrink.

Then there they were, and she let out a breath she didn’t even realize she’d been holding, perhaps worrying that somehow, some way, it would all be a trick. They’d have died or been kidnapped along the way, or Coin took them hostage or something. They couldn’t all be here, alive and here out in the fresh, free air of Seven. But they were, and she saw Magnolia and Phineas stepping in to look after the kids as her mom and dad looked around, unable to conceal the sense of shock and wonder on their faces.

That look felt like what was in her heart. _Home_ , it whispered. A place she’d never really thought she’d see again, and how much worse had it been for them all these years? The only mar on it was two-fold—that Bern and Heike weren’t there to share the moment, and Madge’s exhausted and bandaged face, the way Lindy ran to Haymitch and clung to him as if in the bombing’s aftermath, she was terrified her favorite had gone away and died too. The last time terror and violence had entered her world in an abrupt burst, she’d watched her father die, and she’d likely been trapped for hours in the rubble with an injured Madge. She was only three years old and had watched her father die, been kidnapped and held captive, been in that bloody battle on the train, and almost been killed in the bombing of Thirteen. Johanna didn’t doubt that while she might not be old enough to understand it all, she remembered enough to carry the imprint of the terror of it all.

Haymitch crouched in the snow, carefully prying Lindy loose from his legs and lifting her up into his arms, and she heard him murmuring something lowly to her, holding her tightly. She glanced around and saw people carefully eyeing how the Seven girl ran right to the Twelve man, how he held onto her and comforted her. They’d watched Rhus Amsell die back on the reaping stage back in July. Maybe Haymitch could have bullshitted it for television, and given he’d outed himself as a capable liar there was risk of doubt, but Lindy’s affection could only be something true, genuinely earned. She could almost feel them adjusting their impressions and opinions ever so slightly to take that new factor into account.

Pulled in too many directions at once—Peeta, still wrestling with his grief and the leg, Posy, still so young and plunged into a world she didn’t understand, Vick, thrust into responsibility far too young. But Milltown had taught her the ability to stand back and objectively assess. It was Madge who’d taken the worst of it, so she stepped up to the blond girl. The grey knit cap couldn’t cover the bandages that swathed her ears and a good portion of the right half of her face.

Madge saved her from the awkwardness of asking a stupid question like, _So, uh, can you hear me at all?_ “I’m all right. Just had to fish a few bits of shrapnel out of my cheek so there’s some stitches, that’s why they bandaged it up. But my right ear’s just…empty,” she said in that Twelve drawl, softer than Haymitch’s, her face carefully blank but studied as she was in reading the nuances of people who’d been better concealers than a teenage girl, Johanna picked up on the flicker of fear in those ice-blue eyes. “And I can’t hear anything but ringing in the left.” She held out a small pocket notebook and a pencil, avoiding Johanna’s eyes ever so slightly now. “You’re gonna have to write anything you want to ask me for now.”

She could imagine the embarrassment on Madge’s mind, everyone so visibly seeing her cut down and made frustrated and helpless. Hopefully it didn’t slide slowly unto the abyss of “hopeless”. Johanna shook her head, just reaching out and giving Madge’s shoulder a squeeze of welcome. No need to press her with the awkwardness of writing notes right now; nothing that needed to be said or asked that urgently. 

Seeing Peeta hover nearby like an anxious hawk, sensing that Madge was in better hands there, she stepped back and glanced over at Vick. “You all right?” she asked him, glancing down too at Posy, as ever by her brother’s side. 

“We’re OK,” Vick confirmed, shoving his glasses up his nose and giving her what he probably imagined was his best brave face.

“Auntie Johanna, I gotta pee,” Posy said, chewing on her lower lip, and now Johanna noticed her legs, stiffly pressed together. “And we’re not home, so I’m not s’posed to go by myself.”

“Poe, I told you not to drink so much water—“ Vick shook his head and sighed. 

“I’ve got her,” that slightly heavier Twelve drawl that belonged to the coal miners, and Magnolia Fog appeared just then. “Phin’s bickering with ‘em about the supplies and Gunnar and Petra are getting our things offloaded—sorry, kids ran ahead of me to get the hell off the hovercraft, and I ain’t as spry as I used to be,” she said to Johanna in an undertone.

“No worries. Bathroom’s right there,” Johanna said equally quietly, pointing at the door at the station. From experience with it and seeing how Posy squirmed, Johanna estimated that was a ticking time bomb with about two or three minutes on it. The little girl wasn’t going to make it through the wait for her grandparents to all get there and to make it all the way up the hill. “My mom and dad OK?” she asked. The fact that they’d stayed behind to deal with what little luggage there was, rather than rushing out, told her plenty. They were probably bracing for re-encountering Seven again.

“Just need a moment, I think,” Magnolia said, giving Johanna a knowing glance that Haymitch had obviously inherited, as she reached for Posy’s hand. As she passed, Haymitch handed Lindy over to her as well with a slight shrug.

Then she noticed Aurelius hovering, obviously wanting a word. Back from delivering Lindy to the bathroom brigade, Haymitch stepped back towards Johanna and gave a nod to Peeta that the boy echoed back. “Vick,” Peeta said, “now that they’ve seen us and we’ve seen them and we’re all OK, why don’t we go help the Masons with the luggage?” He tapped Madge on her shoulder and jerked a thumb towards the cargo car of the train.

Vick paused, giving Haymitch a questioning glance and waiting until Haymitch gave him a subtle nod as well, and then hurried off, trailed by Peeta’s slow steps and Madge keeping pace with Peeta. 

The moment she figured they were out of earshot, she turned to Aurelius. “So why are you here?” No point wasting time and beating around the birches.

Aurelius’ craggy brow didn’t wrinkle at all—she had to admit it still almost annoyed her sometimes how impossible it was to ruffle the man. No matter how pissy or bitchy she’d gotten early on to test him, he always kept that serene, almost untouchable demeanor. “President Coin decided that it would be advantageous for you two to continue your therapy in hopes that when you go back to the fight come spring, you’re better off for not being dropped in the middle of it. And as I’m getting close to mandatory retirement age anyway, I was more easily spared to leave Thirteen, shall we say.”

“So she sent us our own personal shrink for a New Year’s gift. How oddly decadent for Thirteen.” If sarcasm dripped any heavier in Haymitch’s tone, she’d half expect to see it manifest as a physical thing, falling in poison green honey-thick drops to the dirty, churned-up snow that clung to all of their boots.

“She also sent me as a trained physician to help with your aim of getting the population back on their feet.” His dark, oil-brown eyes studied her patiently. “Every psychiatrist has training in healing the body as well. Granted, my hands aren’t what they used to be for surgery, but the brain’s perfectly good. And no offense meant, but she wasn’t about to just dispense some of those medical supplies to two combat medics and some backcountry apothecaries who don’t have the training for them.”

She shrugged sharply, glancing over at Haymitch. “No offense in the truth. You’ve always stressed the importance of honesty, haven’t you?” She enjoyed Haymitch’s smirk at the shared joke, given he’d endured Aurelius’ oh-so-patient nagging too.

“And of course I’m supposed to spy on you and regularly report back.” So there was the hidden “gift”—only a Seven person could enjoy the pun given that _Gift_ in one of the old languages meant “poison”. She wasn’t surprised, somehow—wasn’t like she’d imagined Coin suddenly got generous for no reason, especially after she and Haymitch agreed she was a danger. The surprise was that Aurelius would admit it so openly. He shrugged and gave them both a slight, dry smile, obviously registering their lack of shock. “As I said, honesty.”

“Ah, not surprised she couldn’t quite take the thumb off us,” Haymitch said with a sarcastic cheerfulness. 

“What’s your diagnosis on control freaks like her and Snow, anyway?” she asked Aurelius, grinning at him glibly. 

Serene as ever, he hefted his small soft-sided bag. “Might as well get settled so we can get to work—can you please direct me to Records so I can get assigned housing?” he asked.

“Uh…we kind of deposed the existing government yesterday, Doc, so I’d guess just wherever you want to grab an open house,” she said with a shrug. 

Well, that _finally_ got a reaction from him, a moment of wide eyes and a dropped jaw. To his credit, he recovered quickly. “Right, of course,” he murmured. “I suppose maybe it should be near here we’ll establish the hospital…”

It struck her then just how used he was to the bars of the Thirteen cage—he hadn’t even imagined a place where everything wasn’t regimented and recorded, down to the last saltine cracker or sewing needle. He’d covered it well, looking around here so calmly. But he had to be sixty if he was a day, and she wondered then, with a curious pang, if the situation scared him shitless. She’d started to sink into the Capitol-expected role herself, enough so that when she looked back, a wide river flowed already between that Johanna and the one that stood there now, uncomfortably aware of the chill creeping into her toes—stupid fucking thin Thirteen socks for people who stayed indoors all their lives, why hadn’t she put on some of the good wool socks in her drawer? Even she’d started to adjust to that cage in little ways, and the idea scared her.

“I’d say grab a place up in Victors’ Glade,” Haymitch said, glancing back up towards the footpath leading up the hill. “I reckon most of the houses in town aren’t all that suited for inpatient work. Too small.”

She nodded at that—most of the houses, especially on Sawyer’s Row and the like, could maybe take in one or two patients who needed a bed. But there wouldn’t be room for supplies, or anyone who needed to stay there for care. “Not like anyone’s using ‘em,” she said. Chewed her lip for a moment and added, “Might be easier to grab an empty one. Not like we can’t build furniture for it—workshops are right here and all.”

“Wood’s so hard to sterilize,” Aurelius said, shaking his head slightly. “Isn’t there any way to get metal—“

“This ain’t Thirteen with a little bit of everything, Doc,” Haymitch told him quietly. “The steelworking’s all done in Six, and the Capitol’s still in control there.”

“We can make sure it’s waterproof-sealed wood, if nothing else,” she tried to give him a kind of a peace offering. “That should make it more waterproof, easier to clean off.”

Aurelius nodded. “I suppose…there’s no standard mealtime?” It sounded a bit plaintive, a man genuinely lost in the woods. Johanna tried to not cringe for him. The man probably barely knew how to boil water, let alone cook a meal for himself. 

“I’m sure,” Haymitch said, and something strained and awkward in his tone made her glance his way with concern, “you can easily take on someone who’d be happy to help cook and the like, in return for…” Obviously his mind was on Vick and Posy’s mom—Hazelle, the woman who’d been his housekeeper last winter. She could almost sense the silent word _pay_ at the end there, but then Aurelius had never had money either?

They all stood in awkward silence for a minute. “Well, you should come eat with us tonight, then,” Gunnar said, clapping a hand on Aurelius’ shoulder. “We’ll let the young folks and the kids,” he nodded to her and Haymitch and the kids, “settle their own business.” She hadn’t heard her parents come up, but relieved gratitude at the graceful save by her dad, as ever, welled up within her.

But she registered the words and turned to her mom as Gunnar kept going on cheerfully about the virtues of District Seven to Aurelius. “You’re not staying with us?” 

“We all talked it over, Gunnar and Phin and Nola and me,” she murmured back, “and we’ll stay in the Glade, but we’ll take one of the other houses, the four of us. Maybe clean up Miller’s old house so we’ll be next door to you. Trust me, the house was fine with a couple and three kids, big even. But you’ve got five, and putting four more adults in there?” She clicked her tongue softly. “Besides, you two need _some_ space to yourselves. Newlyweds and all.”

Johanna felt glad for the scarf over her face and the slight reddening of her skin already from the cold to hide her reaction, because the sudden embarrassed heat beneath the knitted wool felt scalding. “Ah…” It was a strangled sound, and she turned it into a discreet cough, which she immediately regretted given how it jostled her lungs painfully and turned it into a coughing fit.

She felt rather than saw Haymitch right there by her side in an instant. “OK?” he asked. At least he didn’t coddle her, insist she get inside right then and there and humiliate her with it. Catching her breath, she nodded, grateful there wasn’t the sudden rusty-penny taste of blood in her mouth.

“Mom and Dad say they’ll move in next door, along with your parents,” she told him. “But they want us and the kids to have some space.”

“Would have been crowded with all of us,” he muttered, then gave a gruff sounding chuckle. “Guess they’re trying to be kind after how tight quarters were in Thirteen.”

She looked up and saw her parents now, her dad’s hand at her mother’s waist, her mother’s hand likewise on his shoulder. Their faces turned towards the winter town spread out before them, and she wondered how it looked to them. Did it look like they remembered? Did it still look like home?

Matthias was a fucking wizard, far as she was concerned, using his leverage as an integral part of the community managing the deft trick of trying to insinuate the prodigal daughter and her foreign husband into things, and cheerfully letting people know to expect the return of Petra and Gunnar Mason too. _Snow tried to kill them, but they got rescued by some Peacekeepers on our side, don’t you know, and they’ve been in hiding and working with the rebellion since. Sad thing, though. Couldn’t even let poor Johanna know they were alive._ She’d caught some sympathetic glances her way, the likes of which she hadn’t remembered ever since that long-ago summer when they forgot for a couple months that she was dangerous and deceitful, and she was just a poor orphan girl. 

Given how quickly the gossip ran, everyone probably knew by now that the Masons were coming back, and they’d had a few hours at least to prepare for it. She watched them, unwilling to interrupt the moment between them. Magnolia Fog returned just then as well, leading Posy and Lindy along.

So she slid her hand into Haymitch’s. “Let’s get the kids up to the house.” She couldn’t say exactly how she knew, but there was an odd silent understanding between her and Petra that the four of them would look after the infirmary supplies and baggage for now and getting all that up the hill, and Johanna’s priority needed to be her family. 

From the intent glance Magnolia gave her son as she put Lindy’s hand in his, eyes so much like Haymitch’s, obviously they were having that silent conversation as well. It was a slow walk with Peeta and Madge both having wobbly balance, one from lack of walking constantly on uneven terrain for months with the new prosthesis, the other from messed-up ears. But they made it in the end, finally back at the house. Vick glanced up at it. “This is where we’re gonna live?” he asked, sounding astonished.

“Yep,” she told him. Doing the math, “And we’ll get stuff cleaned up more, and you can have your o—“ She caught the slight shake of Haymitch’s head, the deliberate movement of his eyes between Peeta and Vick, the wave of his hand that said, _Later_.

At sixteen, much as she loved Heike, she’d been glad of suddenly having her own bed, her own room, and not having to share with a sibling’s mutters and squirms and farts and chatter. But those first nights were eerily lonely, she let herself remember that now. And for Vick, maybe having Peeta there was a comfort still. They’d let them have separate rooms later, as things settled more. At least they wouldn’t complain about it, given they’d all shared that single room in Thirteen. She was too damn tired to do much more cleaning today anyway. 

As they walked through the house, she got the same sense from Peeta that she had from Haymitch of seeing something too familiar yet still strange enough for it to sit comfortably, but the boy said nothing, stumping heavily and clumsily up the stairs and fiercely refusing any help. Madge silently led Posy and Lindy upstairs, and just as silently reappeared a few minutes later, blue eyes scrutinizing everything around her. 

They sat down to soup and fresh bread from the Browns, given the kids hadn’t eaten all day. “You can go get more, Vick,” Haymitch told Vick quietly, and she caught Vick’s guilty expression as he looked away from the pot on the stove in a hurry. “Better it not go to waste.”

“But I had my ration,” he protested.

“No more rations,” she said firmly. Vick glanced at the stove again, and then slowly, hesitantly, grabbed his bowl and slipped out of his chair. “Eat up,” she told them.

“You know,” Peeta said, sounding peevish, “it’s rude for us to be talking like this when Madge can’t hear it.” He looked over at Madge, and she read the look on his face plain enough.

A nasty retort rose to her tongue, remembering Katniss on screen last year in the arena, getting to her feet after the explosion and reeling like Madge had on the hill. _So this time you went for full deaf instead of half deaf? Are damaged girls a thing with you?_ She swallowed it back with effort, feeling a bit sick.

Madge eyed him, obviously sensing everyone’s eyes on her, and Johanna saw the flush of red creeping up from her collar. “I may well get some hearing back in my left ear, they said,” she told them defiantly.

Haymitch scribbled something on a piece of paper and passed the folded note neatly to her. Madge read it, glanced up at him, and nodded. “Fine.” Vick nervously slurped his second helping of soup down. Posy looked at her brother in confusion.

“What was that?” she asked Haymitch as they did the dishes, and Madge volunteered to go put the little girls down for a nap.

“I said if she doesn’t get her hearing back, I can teach her and the rest of you some of the Avox’s signs.” He carefully wiped down the pot and set it on the counter. “Learned ‘em over the years.” A few beats of silence, and almost in an undertone, he said, “They were always the only other people in the Twelve apartment a short ways into every Games, after all. And the signing, it was useful with Mags, in the end.”

A funny feeling came over her then at how he’d offered her that bit of information and the implied pain behind it, obviously wanting to talk about both the solitude and the loss of Mags with her, even in such a glancing way. Something precious and broken all at once, like shards of jade. She reached out and wrapped an arm around his waist with a brief squeeze, leaning into him for a moment. _You’re not alone anymore._

“Thanks,” the single word sounding husky and uncertain.

The knock sounded on the door, and she went to go answer. Phineas Fog stood there. Even past eighty, his posture was impeccable, military and precise. “You should come for dinner,” she interrupted whatever he was going to say. “And Aurelius, fine. Stupid to have to cook two meals when we’re trying to get things done and settle in, not to mention you’d probably have to borrow the groceries from us anyway.” She nodded towards the sky, starting to streak with the first dulling hues of twilight—the shortest days of the year and night fell early. “Shops are closing since everyone else already got their shopping done, if it wasn’t something they could get on Sunday.” Had the mills and workshops gone about their business as usual today, or had everyone just said “Fuck it” and stayed home?

His eyebrows rose and his lips twitched up in a faint smile. “Talked me into it. What time?”

“Couple of hours? If you’re hungry, I can send some bread over for you to snack on.” She doubted they’d eaten all day either. “Might as well enjoy the niceties of the kitchen until the Capitol cuts the power and then it gets a lot harder. I’d judge we’ve got a couple more days.” It took the Capitol nearly two weeks to cut the power in Southlands, she’d heard, in all the chaos after that first battle. They’d still taken three or four days at Milltown. It would happen, it was just a matter of when. 

He shook his head. “We’ll do until dinner, thanks.” He glanced past her shoulder. “Is Haymitch here?”

“Don’t think he’s run off on me…yet,” she said dryly. She called for Haymitch, loud as her lungs would let her. “Got some crazy plan to go capture Five so we don’t lose power all winter?”

“That would be nice,” he said wryly. “These old bones feel the cold sharp enough.” 

“Five as the first target for the spring?” Haymitch drawled, voice coming from the hallway towards the two of them. “I’d agree. We’ve taken Four so it’s just a short hop, and if we take Five, well, then we ram it up the Capitol’s ass by going up the coast and taking Three and Six. Cut the Capitol off, surround them. Probably the Capitol’s thoughts as well, and now, that’s a problem, isn’t it?” He leaned an arm on the doorframe, looking over her shoulder at Fog. “Didn’t come to discuss spring strategy, I assume?”

“Fuck’s sake, let him in the house,” she said, nudging Haymitch in the ribs.

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, moving back. Fog stepped inside, wiping his boots off on the rug. The parlor was a bit less dusty than before, and she gestured him to a chair. The ornaments she and Haymitch had cleaned spread over the coffee table.

“Finnick Odair’s dead,” he said without any preamble.

Her heart fell to the floor. She stared hard at the blackbird carved from maple, her great-grandmother Dryade’s work, trying to steel herself with the heat of anger so that the grief wouldn’t sent a flood of hot tears to her eyes. Her fingers clenched. “How?” she asked. “Coin said he escaped in the bombing…”

“I’ve recruited some assets in Thirteen too,” he said, jaw set in a grim line, a glitter of something dangerous and angry in his eyes. “One of whom works in what you might term the death department. It’s concerned with euthanasia and disposal of remains via cremation.”

“There aren’t any truly old people in Thirteen,” Haymitch said softly, in a tone of dazed horror. “They all looked at you…Ma…even Johanna’s folks. The oldest victors, like Taff.” He was right. When they’d first arrived, there had been some odd looks, but she figured it was their foreignness, just the same as they’d looked at her and Haymitch. But it was different.

“Sixty five and retirement age,” Phineas said, tone still quiet, as if giving too much volume to the subject, above a whisper, would make it all the more unbearable. “With dispensation to seventy in some special cases where they’re considered still useful to the society. And all terminal illnesses, people disabled and deemed ‘non-productive’…” His voice trailed off. “Or,” his voice so calm now it was barely human, “a mentally disoriented young victor who’d proven violent. She wanted to euthanize him right off after he was captured. I tried to buy him time by arguing we could turn him, send him instead to the Capitol as a spy—”

She heard Haymitch’s swift intake of breath. “You were going to—“

“I lied, boy,” Phineas snapped, glaring at Haymitch. “Still don’t trust me, do you? I didn’t tell you because you both had enough shit to deal with right then.”

“All right.” 

It was too much to take in. “So Coin took her chance and killed him.”

Phineas nodded, curtly, eyes downcast, hand resting on the armrest of the chair and fingers twitching restlessly from the man’s obvious tension. “In the aftermath of the bombing, he was euthanized along with what they called the ‘hopeless’ injuries. My source confirmed it. He is—was—a distinctive looking man. She was totally certain.” 

“No chance they’re lying to you?” She felt like a foolish child desperately wanting to believe a fairy tale, but she had to ask, had to know whether that last tiny bit of hope was squelched or not.

She heard a deep intake of breath, and he said, oddly gentle, “I’ve run enough assets and taken enough reports over the years. I trust this intel.” 

Now the tears prickled in her eyes, heedless of her will. Green eyes and a sunny smile rose now in her mind; Finnick, her friend through the worst years, his cheerful laugh and unsinkable good humor. A man who’d retained the core of himself despite the shit they inflicted on him, but finally taken and warped by the Capitol into someone who’d hated her, tried to kill her. They’d put him down like he was a rabid dog, not worthy of living. No chance to ever see him become himself again, that they’d walk in this world again as friends, and as free people. Not even a chance to sit down with him and ask _Why?_ No final words. The final image she had of him was with a rage-filled snarl, pointing a gun at her. She’d been halfway prepared to lose him in the arena, but not like this. 

Her breath caught on a sob, but she stuffed it back down. There would be time later for grief. Right now, the flame of anger caught, fierce and white-hot, keeping her from collapse. And now she knew how to make it something controlled that sustained her, rather than a wildfire that burned everyone around her indiscriminately. “She lied to us,” she said, voice shaking with rage. “Told us he escaped. ”

“She could have just told you he died in the bombing. She probably wanted you off your guard worrying about a crazed assassin stalking you all the way here.”

“That ‘crazed assassin’ is,” Haymitch’s voice faltered slightly but recovered, “ _was_ our friend.”

“I’m sorry.” 

Another casualty of this war: the Capitol had killed him, Thirteen had killed him. Neither of them saw the human being that was Finnick Odair, only deemed him a potential weapon or a useless object. “They’ll pay.” She wasn’t sure whether she meant the Capitol, Thirteen, or very likely both. Both, she decide. “Snow. And Coin. Because both of them killed him.”

“Don’t turn it into revenge,” Haymitch cautioned her quietly. She turned on him angrily, until she saw the hard, steely eyes that she recognized hid his own towering rage. “We’ll make them pay. But it’ll be justice. For Finnick and too many others.”

She nodded, seeing the rightness to that. No sense being a hypocrite, urging people to fight for justice and then indulging in private vengeance. “But it’s another thing worth fighting for.” She’d have the anger at the injustice of it, and to honor Finnick’s memory, as another spur to help keep her going. But she’d be pragmatic enough to not make it personal. So long as Snow and Coin fell in the end, she didn’t give a damn whether hers was the hand that held the blade. Another thought came to her, and she asked Phineas, words bitter in her mouth, “Did they—the ashes—“

“Scattered on the surface with the rest, I assume.” He’d died so far from home, surrounded by strangers, unmourned and unmemorialized. Maybe some stray breeze would carry some of Finnick back home to his southern shore, to the richly ripe-smelling marshes and cypresses, the gentle sway of marshgrass, the leap of little fish, the light shining on the water on a sunny day. The place had never spoken to her in the way the great northern forests did, but spending time in Four like that, she felt like she’d understood Finnick better than she ever had. Maybe his spirit was back there already, the true, untroubled Finnick far, far away from the Capitol’s twisted schemes. 

He was truly free, and she’d spent months believing him dead already, but now the door shut on it finally. He wouldn’t see the world he’d wanted to fight for come to pass. He’d never get to be with Annie, free of all the sick perversions and lies that he’d had to wear as a mask.

“Does Annie already know?” Haymitch asked. She startled slightly, looked at him and had a momentary insane thought that he’d actually read her mind.

“I told her,” Phineas answered, and his face creased into a frown, brown eyes suddenly old and tired. “Offered her a place here if she’d had her fill of war for now. She refused, said now she really needed to dig in and make it worth it. She went with Cashmere, Lyme, and Brutus the very next day back to Two. Suicide to try to fight in the mountains in winter, but they’re establishing garrisons there as well, so that the loyalists don’t just waltz in and retake what we’ve already bought with a lot of blood.”

“She’s from Four. Makes sense she’d fight.” After all, Annie had been raised to the arena and the fight far more than Johanna had. She just hoped like hell her friend didn’t lose her way back to the peace of the salt marshes and sun-glint waters in the snowy passes of Two. “Can I talk to her?”

“Now?”

“No, but soon.”

“I’ll set up the call,” Phineas said, looking at her thoughtfully. “Your woman Wiress invented a solar charger for the phones, so we can stay in contact. Guess she figured they’d cut the power here too.” He smiled without any humor. “Some of the other victors stayed there for now—I think they feel safer there with the routine and all. A few others came here, the ladies from Eight, mainly. But Wiress and Beetee stayed behind, of course. Doubt they were given a choice.”

Haymitch gave a dry chuckle. “Essential to the war effort. Of course.”

“I did leave them a phone to keep in touch,” Phineas said with a quick smirk. “I don’t put much stock in his common sense, but she’s a sharp blade underneath the weird speech, sure enough.”

“So what now?” Both of them looked at her. “I mean, shit, first we take on the Capitol, and then District Thirteen?”

“Sounds about the shape of it,” Haymitch answered her. “And we take on the Capitol while not letting Coin know we’re onto her.” He shrugged. “Don’t know about you, but I generally consider it not a good idea to piss off the people with nukes to the point where they’re willing to wipe everything off the map.”

“They won’t do that in a hurry,” Phineas argued. “After the world saw what happened in the Fall, and the devastation of pushing that button? Nuclear winter, fallout, famine, cancer, entire sections of former countries turned into toxic wasteland, horrible mutations when the survivors did have children—between that and the fighting over water and food and other essentials and how savage it all got, you got three results of that. The people who seized power became the Capitol, the quarantined safe zones became the districts under their control…and the population fell through the floor in the space of ten years and hasn’t really recovered since. We’re at war now because governments couldn’t keep their fingers off the damn nuke button.” They’d all learned about the Fall in school extensively in history. The graphic newstapes and pictures and accounts of nuclear devastation and people gone brutal and feral had freaked the hell out of Panem schoolchildren for generations now. Now, as a grown woman, it was much easier to see the fear tactic, and how it all became something of a control mechanism. _Strict order is how we avoid the chaos and savagery of the days after the Fall. Anarchy is the worst of human conditions._

“Snow’s too afraid of anarchy and destroying too much of the production system, as specialized as it is,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “And Coin won’t want to risk killing the population off or hurting their ability to have healthy kids. They’ll hold off for now.”

“I didn’t mean to turn this into a strategy session.” Phineas’ wry smile came back and then abruptly faded. “And sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”

“It’s all right,” Haymitch said, sighing and pushing out of the chair with only a slight wince. It must have pulled at his shoulder or his side. “Better that we know. We’ll see you and Ma and the rest for dinner.”

Once the old man had left, she turned to Haymitch. “He should have died in the arena,” she said, hearing how harsh the words sounded, but trusting he would understand. “Better that than dying like that, what they turned him into.”

His laugh was a hollow sounding thing. “Way I see it, we should have all died in the arena rather than turn into what they made us, darlin’.”

She grabbed him, held onto him tight, so tight it was hard to breathe for more reason than just her chest wound. She’d watched too many people die in this war already, from victors in the arena to the broadcast of poor Rhus, to the suicide bomber at Milltown. But this was the first death that cut so deeply, and it hurt all the more for those weeks she’d had Finnick back again, relieved her friend had survived. “He deserved to die fighting, if he couldn’t live and marry Annie and have, I don’t know, probably a dozen kids who’d all be sickeningly cute and sweet.”

That image had her laughing and crying all at once, for what she could easily imagine and what joy would never be now. Oh fuck, how it hurt, the memory of Finnick’s smile and jokes seared into her brain, and that was Finnick, that was the man he’d chosen to be. Not the things they’d forced upon him. It seemed too unfair that there was a better world for the winning still, and a good man like him wouldn’t ever get his share of it.

“When this is over…I don’t know what they do in Four.” Surely it wasn’t like Seven’s memorial trees, and somehow it would feel wrong to plant one here for him. She wouldn’t trap a piece of Finnick here, so far from his home and the sea that he’d loved. “But we should go there and do it. For him.” She thought about it for a second and added, “For Mags too,” knowing how both Haymitch and Finnick had loved the old woman, and Johanna had respected the hell out of her at least.

His arms tightened around her. She brushed her lips lightly across his jaw, not flirtatiously, simply a kindness. “Let’s get busy with dinner,” she said, pushing back from him and gesturing back towards the kitchen. “Best thing for us all right now will be to hear this house full of people.” She’d lived with ghosts too long, him even more so, than to dwell upon yet another one would be too much to bear. She needed to be around the living, to hitch up to them rather than to the corrosive grief for the dead. 

“I’ll go start the vegetables and all.” His voice was low and apologetic, his eyes averted from hers. “But first thing for you—get all the liquor out of the house tonight. Please.” 

“All right,” she said, putting her hand on his arm as she passed in a moment of reassurance. Better she get it out of the house, because if the flame of anger went out tonight or any other night when the wound was still so raw, she’d want to drown that blackness too, and spruce gin would do it. Maybe she’d even start with the excuse of taking a shot in memory of Finnick, but it wouldn’t stop there. Haymitch had been down that dark badger hole for too long, and she’d started to wander too close to it sometimes, when even anger or gaining the satisfaction of control over a Capitolite didn’t make the sick feeling and pain go away. Chances were in another ten or fifteen years she’d have been as drunk as Haymitch had.

Better to recognize temptation and not give in. But she’d take it next door for safekeeping. No point dumping it all when so many families would be glad for a good bottle in return for some help with firewood or the like. Scarred and broken things she and Haymitch were, perhaps, even more so than before, though stronger in some ways too. But they had others around them now to keep them on the course, determined to not give in. Finnick, and what she owed him, just added to that tally. And she wouldn’t forget.


	42. Chapter 42

The whistle blew with a sharp, ear-piercing screech that cut through even the dingy winter gloom. Silently, the workers cleared off their stations, neatly folding and tagging projects in progress, shutting down the sewing machines, tossing useless scraps in the bin. Shears and cutters, firmly attached to the worktables by their bright steel chains, were left on the tables, readily visible for count by the Peacekeepers. They filed out, and five minutes later, it was as if nobody had ever been alive in this particular factory, never churned out work pants and shirts by the dozens each day.

2 in the afternoon, and the factories all shut down for the day, textile and garment factories alike. Only half-shifts for the workers now with half the country captured by the rebels and less of a need for cloth or clothing. Half rations too, given that seceded half was the food-producing half of Panem. The Capitol had figured that a shorter workday would mean less of a need for calories for the workers. 

Even Peacekeepers felt the sting as well. As he toured the factory, silently counting the tools and surveying the workstations, he felt the drag of fatigue in his limbs, the sort that came from never having enough to eat anymore. It was an old feeling he remembered from years ago, summers working hot and fast in the woods and even with snares and foraging to add to their issued rations, they all came back to the winter town in autumn as lean and hard as a hickory stick, bone-weary and half-numb in the head.

With inspection finished, he went to grab his overcoat from the closet up in the guard room, and figured he’d head back towards Peacekeeper’s Row. Nothing else to do in the way of duties until 10 PM when his watch began—until then, others would have rounds and making sure that people kept curfew. Couldn’t risk them being out and about after the rebellion last winter, the factory that got bombed. Pointed message, really, bombing a factory that made Peacekeeper uniforms. Brave move, but pretty stupid, given there was no way President Snow would let that one just slide. The mass grave where they’d buried the dead, and the ones executed as the leaders—rightly named or not—was a place the locals still wouldn’t go. Most Peacekeepers wouldn’t either, for that matter.

District Eight had been more or less on lockdown for the better part of a year now. The days right after the Quell, well, the extra influx of Peacekeepers who’d been there since winter, the executions in the town square, and another few dozen so-called “troublemakers” and “traitors” who had joined that pit at the west edge of town just to make it clear that it wouldn’t behoove Eight to get any more brilliant ideas about rebelling. 

He passed through the square, eyes averted from the stage. He hadn’t been one who’d wielded a pistol, given that he wasn’t marked as one who’d been singled out as requiring the steel nerves and heart required and trained for the mentally demanding particulars of a Capital Punishment designation, but he’d been assigned to crowd control, standing right there. He’d heard behind him as Corduroy Darzi asked, voice wavering, for someone to take down his final words to give to Cecelia. Head Bloodgood, hadn’t even responded to that, just nodded surreptitiously to Theo, acting as the district’s recordskeeper for justice and punishments, to take down the names.

At least he hadn’t had to watch it happen. The faces in the crowd as the shots rang out, and the few stifled moans and shrieks, had been hard enough to watch. The few Peacekeepers who’d tried to protest even slightly, got assigned to escort the prisoners across the stage, and scrub the blood and brains off of it later. Too many of them were the ones who went silent after the winter executions, who lingered at the mass grave during duty rounds or avoided looking, as if ashamed—Theo was one of those, but he’d kept his silence that day. Gary had his eye on the man ever since he arrived from reassignment from District One, and after the Quell executions, Theo had eagerly joined them. Having the man who’d effectively become Bloodgood’s secretary on their side was a stroke of incredible luck.

But it made sense. He’d already questioned, but somewhere in that jumbled, broken-ass black mental emptiness that Theodosius Law had apparently called his “past”, a thirty-eight-year-old man had fished out something that acutely disturbed him about executing victors’ families. Probably because as Gary had found out soon enough after when he called in for a report, Theo Law had once been a little snot-nosed Twelve boy. He’d been Ashford Abernathy. But they’d taken that from Theo. They took it from Heike too, from what the Fogs had told him that winter in Two, years ago, when they took him in after the surgery on his injured leg. All he knew was she was off in one of the districts now, and they’d messed with her mind. Just another ordinary district orphan funneled into the system, albeit one with no past, no memories to trouble her loyalties. He didn’t ask what they’d heard about Heike of late, during his briefly snatched opportunities to report. He couldn’t be that man right now, not with the tight scrutiny on everyone here in Eight, and Bloodgood’s baleful eye watching them all for signs of cracking, let alone outright treason. He had to be Berengarius Law, in his mind and heart, as much as he could. Bernhard Mason would have to wait. 

He couldn’t even unbend enough to rib Theo—Ash, he’d accepted that story with a strange expression of relief, as if it explained something he’d always known but never could figure—about how they were now family now. Johanna married and with kids now, shit; in his mind she was still the fierce, mouthy, awkward teenager who tried to outdo the boys and pretended she didn’t care that nobody came to go walking out with her. He couldn’t think of that cruel, angry woman he’d seen on television as his sister, never could. He couldn’t call it a relief hearing about everything that’d been done to her, the lies she’d had to tell, but it at least made sense now. She’d come back from the arena changed, by turns silent and enraged, but not that different. But what they’d done to Johanna was one more log thrown on the fire, quietly banking the flames again.

He passed the bombed-out ruins of the Peacekeeper factory, seeing workers duck their heads at the sight of his white uniform and hurry back towards the tight cluster of high-rise grey brick buildings of the ghetto that they lived in, crowded in like a swarm of bees. He’d never been in there, but he’d heard—five, seven, ten people to an apartment sometimes. The Peacekeepers always went in armed, and in groups. They left that to the “brute squads”, the ones best trained in crowd control and capital punishment. 

He’d arrived from Twelve just after New Year’s almost six years ago now. Would have been at his new assignment in Six for a third rotation, except they’d kept him here last winter when they’d called for reinforcements. So he’d been in a position to best observe Eight for the resistance, and how things had changed. They’d never made arrests at home until last winter, preferring to surprise the suspect out on the factory floor during the day, drag them away in a pageant of justice-as-spectacle and let everyone else see it and feel the public shaming. 

Since then they’d learned a new way. Arrests by day were a stern warning. Bursting into apartments in the middle of the night to make an arrest, dragging people from their beds and executing them in the square, leaving their hanged bodies strung up in the square come morning as people went to work, was a new type of fear, even more potent than those public executions after the Quell. It kept people in Eight afraid, full of dread at things done in the dark. The simmering anger he’d felt around Katniss and Peeta’s Victory Tour was long gone. 

The ropes had tightened around Peacekeepers as well. It certainly hadn’t escaped official notice that in Four, Seven, Nine, Ten, Eleven, numerous Peacekeepers had defected and joined the rebels readily. Command in Two, and President Snow, would rather die than let anyone know it, but he’d heard on his last report to General Fog that in Seven, the Head herself had defected. He barely knew Athena Law back when he was a Seven man, but she’d been Fog’s agent for years, saved him and his parents and Heike, so he wasn’t fully surprised that her sympathies stood with the rebellion. But treason at the highest level must have rattled the Capitol like crazy. A paranoid sense of eyes constantly on them, frequent interviews about “morale”, and Marcia, who’d come from Three as a near-reaping age orphan, had confided quietly to him that she knew they’d installed cameras and microphones in the Peacekeeper housing.

So when he came home and saw Theo standing on his porch and someone else beside him, another figure in a white winter coat, the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. Was this it? Had Theo sold him out? “Company, Theo?” he asked, trying to keep his voice casual.

“Thalaea,” Theo nodded to the woman at his side, “asked if she could join.”

“Not much else to do these nights except play cards,” she said, her voice rich in tone but surprisingly light. No trace of an accent that he could place. He didn’t know her, one of the transfers that past winter. “Theo mentioned you two played war on Thursdays, so…”

Hesitating would just look even weirder and give more cause for suspicion. “Sure,” he said cheerfully, opening the door, but giving Theo a sharp glance as Thalaea headed inside. _What is this?_ Was she someone sent to watch them both? 

Theo nodded slightly and flicked Gary a surreptitious thumbs-up with a gloved hand. _She’s OK._

“You know where the kitchen’s at,” he called to Theo. “Tea’s been used only twice, I think, so…might be some use left in it.” As Theo headed into the tiny kitchen to boil some weak tea-water for them, Gary busied himself with the device Marcia had concocted, hidden in a lamp in the cramped parlor. Some crazy plan sent by Wiress Parker that made no fucking sense to him, but which the former Three woman had immediately understood and managed to build. Apparently it managed to loop the cameras and microphones, supplying some kind of safe, previous recording that made it look all nice and dandy while people could talk about whatever the hell they wanted without fear. 

“So?” he headed into the kitchen and challenged Theo quietly, seeing Thalaea standing there as well.

“She came from One with me,” Theo said, adding the nearly-colorless, reused tea leaves to the water. “She’s genuine.”

“She’s standing right here,” Thalaea said dryly, gaze moving between the two men. “You want my credentials? I was born in the Capitol. My mother and father were Antiplaea and Jorestes Thistledown. She was rumored to have a solid shot in the next Capitol election to make some reforms, until she and my father suddenly were caught plotting a supposed coup against President Snow. Convenient. They were executed when I was nine years old. And I was sent to the Peacehome as repayment for that treason.” Her eyes were hard and shining, like two chips of obsidian, and he could see the color rising in her face even beneath that dark, ginger-cake skin. “Is that reason enough for you? I would hope it’s enough that I just want to see them fall.”

“We have to be careful, Lea,” Theo said, tone obviously meant to soothe. “It’s hard these days to know who’s legitimate and who’s just trying to ferret out would-be rebels. You know Bloodgood’s got his hounds.”

“Considering Snow’s got you right at Bloodgood’s side pushing paper for safekeeping and close watch,” Thalaea observed, tone dripping with acid. “After all, your traitor brother’s causing quite the ruckus. We all know they think it might be in the blood, right?”

Theo smiled cheerfully, and suddenly he looked like a slight echo of his brother, at least what Gary had seen of Haymitch on television. That knowing, devilish grin below sharp, intense grey eyes: “And I do such a good job convincing Bloodgood that I’m a loyal son, who has no idea about his past and doesn’t care, don’t I?”

Apparently Haymitch Abernathy wasn’t the only one in his family with a talent for tightly maintaining a cover in the face of the enemy, Gary thought dryly. Given Theo’s memory blanks were genuine, maybe it really was in the blood. Funny thing—the extent of the amnesia was one of the few facts he knew about the man, and that one was only because Gary had been the one to reveal the truth to him months ago. They’d both agreed that kin by marriage or not, better to not know too much right now. They had to live cautiously. That meant less people to take down with it if they were caught. He never would imagined at twenty that this would be his life at thirty, spies and lies and secrets. He’d been unable to keep a secret to save his life back then, existed mainly to be the life of the gathering and make people grin, loud words and constant quips, and the only thing that kept him from being a summer-song grasshopper content to joke his way through life was the ambition to be something more and the talent with his hands that drove him towards a carpenter apprenticeship. That force of will had served him well after he woke up in a Two hospital with a gunshot left leg and a bullshit story about it being an accident that had happened to him on-duty down in Ten.

“You should have asked me months ago,” Thalaea informed them, still obviously aggrieved. “Trusted me.”

“Not like there’s much going on right now,” he pointed out dryly. “It’s not glamorous. We’re left trying to figure out where best to drive the maul when we’ve got the opportunity and how to whip that up. It’s not like joining up when the rebellion’s attacking and you make your choice in the heat of battle. Not easy to watch and wait for months unable to do anything much, but having to keep your cover flawless.”

“You’ve done it for years,” Theo observed, eyes searching Gary’s face intently.

“Not easy,” he repeated, stressing the words. “You think you can do it? Even when you need to tell someone? When you can’t tell friends, lovers?” Better that the Peacekeepers generally understood that friendships were transient and so were romances. It meant that nobody probed too deeply. But still, sometimes when he woke in the night, aching to reach out and touch someone and unburden his soul, it was almost worse to have someone there, woman or man, that the only thing they could share was their bodies. 

He’d spent most of the time since getting to Eight keeping to himself, except for a few casual flings mutually agreed upon. But those first couple of years in Twelve had been hell. He’d drowned the grief with meaningless sex with any number of women and men, though he’d kept it only to fellow Peacekeepers, because after hearing Magnolia Fog’s story, he couldn’t bear to touch any of the exhausted, half-starved Twelve folks coming to Peacekeepers out of pure desperation. Even been to Ripper’s stall for some white liquor, because if it was good enough for Head Cray and Haymitch Abernathy, he figured it was good enough for him.

It was actually looking at Haymitch that turned him around finally. That last summer before Gary came here to Eight, seeing that the man gave up even the veneer of trying and came back from the Games a drunken wreck and stayed that way right up until Gary left at New Year’s, and presumably stayed that way beyond, he decided couldn’t live like that. The man had lost all his family—even if they were alive out there and Haymitch didn’t know it. Fuck, more than once, a little tipsy, he’d wanted to go up to the Village and just tell the man his family was still alive, maybe spend a few hours in the company of someone who apparently felt equally drowned in grief and isolation. The only person he could relate to at all was Twelve’s drunk outcast, and the idea of becoming like that, hopeless and lost, maybe even to the point of slipping and getting caught and getting people killed by the truth, got through to him. 

Well, if there was ever a warm and fuzzy family reunion, he wasn’t thanking Haymitch for that. _So you’re helping lead a rebellion and obviously doing OK now, but hey, thanks for being so openly depressed and hopeless it made me really not want to be like you. Oh, and by the way, treat my sister nice or else. Even if she’s capable of defending herself._ He tried to not smile at the thought, imagining it.

“I’ve got nobody,” Thalaea said, eyes avoiding his, a downward curve to her mouth as she looked away. “Learned quickly enough that nobody goes out of their way to be warm and fuzzy towards a treason-price child, and when you get criticized as a soft little Capitolite to boot—I learned to keep to myself.” She was maybe only a few years older than him, but that meant she’d lived over twenty years that way. And the Corps had likely forgiven her when she did her duty loyally after joining up at eighteen, but obviously the old scars of a shunned childhood, and murdered parents, lingered still. So here she was, ready to join the rebellion eagerly. Just another person whose life the Capitol had poisoned.

“All right.” Theo handed out the tea, sweetened with a miserly pinch of sugar. It was like drinking hot water, but at least the warmth seeped into him. The old leg wound in particular pained Gary this winter, with morphling and even basic willowprofen strictly rationed for use on the battlefields. He sat down in his chair, sighing heavily, head tipped back for a moment and eyes closed. “Only one execution last night. Peplum Faruk—which, as far as I understood it, consisted mainly of taking too long a bathroom break due to time of the month, and then arguing with the floor overseer about the need for longer breaks for menstruating women. Then when they found out she’d taken some scraps from the bin as well to help deal with the blood, well, that tacked theft of Capitol property onto promoting insurrection and that was it. I wrote down her statement so we can claim she had a fair chance to defend herself, and of course, whatever she said got ignored.”

“Fuck’s sake,” Thalaea muttered tiredly, shaking her head, pinching the bridge of her nose between her fingers. “We’re hanging women now for having a period?”

“We’ve also hanged them for soliciting prostitution, begging, disobedience, failing to give way to Peacekeepers on the street, wearing mourning in defiance of orders…” Theo ticked five fingers off his left hand, pointing to each, and then kept tracking his right index finger in the air in measured arcs far beyond in a weary _and so on_ gesture. “Lea, dear, do you really think you keep people terrified by executing them for only genuine illegal shit? You keep them worried that anything might do it. That somehow, they don’t know how, but they might die for eating an apple in a Peacekeeper’s presence.”

Thalaea nodded, a sharp, thin smile on her lips. “Or daring to suggest things in the Capitol could change. Mother found that out. So did Katniss Everdeen, for all that.” 

“I don’t know how we’ll get them ready to fight back,” Gary admitted. He’d seen the spark in them go out over the last year, like a guttered candle. “They were hoping, early in the summer, you could tell.”

“Cloth isn’t a high priority compared to securing the grain supply, I imagine,” Theo said grimly. “But someone always fights back. Someone who’ll be able to lead the charge, because it can’t just be us. We just need to find them and get them to work with us and keep it under wraps until closer to spring, when Thirteen will hopefully back any uprising.”

Thalaea absorbed that, looked over at Gary. “So what’s your story?” She jerked a thumb at Theo. “I know his. He told me when I told him all about my parents.”

He hesitated for a moment. But then, Athena Law would already die if she was caught for having joined the rebels openly. He could always claim they’d killed his parents but spared him since he was young and strong, a good addition to the Corps. And it had felt ridiculously good to tell Theo, to not be alone anymore. She didn’t have the shadow of the arena in her family, true, but she’d been caught in the snare of unfair accusations of treason just the same, and condemned to the Peacekeepers too. 

He’d have to trust the people he brought into this, so he’d trust her with this much. “Johanna’s my little sister. My name is—was—Bernhard Mason,” he said quietly, already prepared to lock the name back down in his mind even as he spoke it. Some days he felt like he didn’t even need tracker jacker venom like Heike or Ash Abernathy to forget that old life. It was already an effort to recall the journeyman carpenter who’d had his ambitions and plans, who’d loved looking at the wood as a blank canvas with infinite possibility, admiring the grain and each whorl. Someone who’d danced at shindigs under the starry sky and in wintertime mills heavy with the sweet smell of fresh sawdust, drank spruce beer and flirted, dreamed about a future and love once he’d made master. He’d been someone who’d adored his little sisters, rested secure in the love of his family and friends, a glib jokester who lived to make everyone happy. But it all felt distant, like it lay under too many thick layers of dust, or maybe all of that got planed down and then he’d been carved into something else. He wouldn’t even ask Phineas or Magnolia on the phone about his parents and Johanna, much as he longed to sometimes, let alone ask to talk to them. He couldn’t be Bern again, not yet. Some small part of him worried than maybe he might not ever be.

~~~~~~~~~~~

The first week in Seven, Haymitch had walked the few hundred feet from the new hospital back to the house, so exhausted he could barely stay awake through dinner, Johanna equally weary. Too many patients flooding the hospital just as they got it going, and both of them still recovering as well. He’d noticed that Peeta and Madge seemed to go do the day’s cooking with Haymitch and Johanna’s parents, that when they trudged home after darkness fell, dinner was always on the table.

Three weeks in now, the worst was over. He’d felt the strength slowly returning to him, and the flood of dire cases from the woodswalkers was over, either recovered or deceased by now. Though in those first frenzied days, while workers hurried to bring in beds and tables, they’d been doing surgery in an upstairs bedroom that got the best of the natural light, hurrying to make the best of the few hours of daylight since the Capitol switched the electricity off the day after Thirteen’s supplies arrived. 

He’d performed amputations on frostbitten fingers and toes, or cleaned out and stitched infected wounds, until his exhausted hands shook like they used to when he went too long without a drink, and Aurelius quietly sent him back out to the basics of diagnostics and dosing and bandaging for an hour or so, keeping Johanna’s younger, steadier hands with him for surgery, swapping her out for Haymitch again when she finally gave out. So it went until it grew too dark for even solar-powered lanterns, let alone candles.

Three weeks in now, things had evened off greatly. Now it was more the likes of a cut from a slipped axe swing, or a bad cold. They had to send a lot of people home with nothing more than sutures and ground willowbark, or a suggestion of tea and honey for a cough. The precious stores of morphling, anesthesia, and the like, had to be kept for the genuinely hard cases. Right now they had two people in precarious shape from pneumonia, and one old man that Aurelius had grimly diagnosed as dying of lung cancer. But one of the local apothecaries, Serratina Wilde, had joined the hospital, and a familiar face issuing prescriptions and advice helped smooth things over as well. 

The bitter January cold seemed all the harder for the lack of heat that he’d been spoiled by all these years in the Village, and snowstorms howling down from the north constantly dumped more snow on them all. Living in a mountain valley had meant bad snow sometimes, but usually it dumped in several blizzards and quit before it got too much beyond waist height. Here in Seven, it kept accumulating, sometimes in blizzards, sometimes an insidious, deceptively innocuous few inches at a time, and people seemed to shrug off snow piled high as the roof as absolutely normal and just dug paths and tunnels.

At least he’d landed in a place used to that routine. Their crews and cycles for winter woodcutting for firewood were well-established. And as firewood was one thing Thirteen hadn’t regulated, probably since they didn’t transport it, he wasn’t going to call local use to Coin’s attention. They had a healthy stockpile of firewood dried over the last several years, and overall people seemed to police it themselves and notice who tried to take more than their fair share. Though the new firewood quota imposed for other districts also needing to get through a rough winter wasn’t unfamiliar either—Twelve had the winter coal quota for the same reason—but he’d heard the weary grumbles of, _Thought things would change without the Capitol._

Standing in ration lines to get food, firewood quotas—familiar routines, and about all that had changed was no Peacekeepers breathing down peoples’ necks and making them build, as Johanna dryly observed, “shitty mass produced furniture”. 

But seeing the faces of former Peacekeepers mingling among everyone else stuck with him, and so when Gunnar dropped the kids off that night, along with dinner, he asked him quietly, “Did y’all hear anything about the Peacekeeper prisoners that Coin transported? She’d said they were going to a prison camp in the Ten-Eleven borderlands where the rest have supposedly gone?”

Gunnar’s hazel eyes darkened, his expression growing tense beneath the burgeoning growth of grey-white facial hair he’d resumed on arriving here in Seven. “You’ve got concerns?”

He shook his head, glancing over at Johanna discussing something with her ma, laughing out loud easily now with her lungs healed up, and laughing all the harder as if it had been pent up in her just waiting. “We know now she’ll kill off what she sees as ‘useless mouths’ in Thirteen. Now, she might genuinely be keeping those prisoners alive down in the south as a bargaining chip, but me, I don’t know she’s so ignorant as to believe Snow gives a damn about their lives.” Maybe those Peacekeepers were Capitol fanatics at worst, but that didn’t mean they deserved a bullet in the skull, or whatever she did to them.

“I’ll see if Phin knows anything, or can find out from his assets in Thirteen. I doubt we can get eyes on the supposed site if not.”

Haymitch shook his head tiredly. “Priorities. We’ve got bigger game to chase.” There were too many things needing what spies were out there, too many plans to make for spring and beyond, too many questions unanswered. It felt too much like the years before the Quell, delicately discussing what they all could between them to make even a tentative plan for when the right moment came, but so limited in what information even a victor had, at a remove from the pulse of their home districts as they were. So much of it was blind faith and pushing forward, simply willing to find a way to work it out.

Gunnar nodded at that, grunted lowly in his throat in that sound Haymitch had learned to identify as some sort of vague agreement. “Don’t burn yourself out,” he said, gruff-voiced. “You’ve got other priorities too.” 

_Oh, was that Seven passive-aggressive?_ In a sense, he’d been waiting for this ever since Gunnar arrived in Thirteen—the casual warning and all the disapproval that hid behind it. “Is this where we establish Johanna could have done better?” He smiled that snarky, careless smile to show the man how nothing he could say or do could hurt anymore. “Agreed.”

Another grunt, this one sounding amused. “She doesn’t need me to defend her against you or anyone else.” But there was an oddly tired, flat note to his voice as he said it—the realization of the years he hadn’t been there for her? “I started late too. Lived alone so long it wasn’t easy to adjust. All my old friends had kids already, and the couples having first kids when we had Bern were mostly five, ten, fifteen years younger. So.” He eyed Haymitch carefully. “And from what I understand, Phineas, well, he couldn’t marry Nola or have much to do with raising you boys, so he doesn’t have much cause to know much about all that.” He shrugged his shoulders carelessly, a little awkwardly. “Point is, I’m not going to interfere, but if you need help, you can ask. Won’t tell her about it, or hold it against you.”

He’d expected the veiled insult and threat, the warning that Johanna might accept him, but he was on notice with the Masons for the time being. The implication of not only acceptance, but Gunnar actually trying to help—it practically disarmed him, left him feeling like an idiot standing there in full armor, sword at the ready, while the wolf springing at his throat turned out to be just a puppy wanting to cuddle.

 _I notice you tend to automatically expect people to reject you,_ Aurelius had noted dryly. 

_Me? Nah, everyone’s been sunshine and daffodils._ Why should he expect anything different? The world had told him over and over what little worth he had, except as the occasional tool in a greater scheme. And yet: Lindy’s hugs, Johanna’s smiles and the soft warmth of her beside him at night, Vick’s shy affection, Peeta’s trust, even Gunnar’s quietly extended support now. Even the way he could walk into a shop here without the same prickling anxiety he’d had for years in Twelve, knowing he wasn’t wanted, conducting his business quickly and quietly as possible. What was he fighting for if not a changed world? But he hadn’t let the world change for him, still looked for the stab of the knife, whether hidden or obvious, in everyone he met, braced for their revulsion and impatience. 

Throat suddenly tight with the urge to laugh at the absurdity of it all, he turned the sound into a quick cough to cover it. “Thanks,” he said, meaning it, trying to not feel overwhelmed by the sense of acceptance. Yes, they both knew Gunnar had certainly hoped for better for Johanna, as a father ought, but he wasn’t going to belabor the point.

After dinner, and after the kids went up to bed, he and Johanna sat by the dying embers of the parlor fire, bundled up in quilts and blankets. Neither of them slept easily at night still, and rather than thrashing around restlessly for an hour or so after Thirteen’s lights out, it was easier to sit here for a while and talk, let it relax them, and then head up to bed. The echoes of earlier in the evening, the kids and their folks here all spending time together, the warmth of laughter and family as well as the fire, felt good. Little things as mundane as Vick’s math homework or Peeta helping Posy draw a picture meant so much. Hours later, it didn’t feel like the ghostly absence of something, but more the quiet calm in the aftermath, part of a reliable cycle. Tomorrow night they’d be here again, and the next night, and the next.

Wrapping the quilt a bit tighter around himself, he joked, “So who’s gonna be the one to tell Posy she can’t have a green kitty?” He gestured towards the table where her picture of a proudly white-and-green blotched cat sat. They’d post in on the refrigerator, he figured.

“Eh, I’m sure we can get some dye if we really had to.” He could barely see her smile, shadowed as they both were by the last feeble light of the fire. “Nice of you to not get upset at it. Capitol and all.”

“Please. You were there for the pet-dyeing craze too. That’s only been the last five years or so.”

“You looked off for a second there when she said it was her favorite color. Figured that was why.”

“Green’s her favorite, I know.” Johanna waited, obviously sensing that there was more. “Katniss’ favorite too,” he admitted quietly. In that moment, he’d looked and seen not wavy-haired little Posy proudly showing off her art, but looking at the sick look on Peeta’s formerly smiling face, sitting there beside Posy and looking like he’d been punched in the face, he’d suddenly imagined another Seam-dark little girl with two fat braids, coloring a dog or some other animal an improbable green happily and dragging it home to show to Burt and Perulla. “It got to Peeta.”

“Got to you too, I’d say.”

The tight knot within him felt fit to strangle him. “What do you want me to say? She’s gone, been six months, no point in fussing anymore? You want me to tell you that you don’t get to give a damn about Finnick either?” It was a cheap shot, and also something of shooting his own foot off given it got him thinking bleakly about Finnick as well, and how forlorn the end of his life had been. “I…” The weariness descended over him, the upwelling of grief and lethargy, all the dead he still carried with him and hadn’t saved. Suddenly he was glad she’d gotten the alcohol out of the house when he’d asked. 

“Not saying that.” Her voice started off quiet, tentative, but she regained her strength and certainty quickly. “And yeah, you haven’t really had time to deal with Katniss. I know that. But you’ve lived with the dead too damn long, Hay. And there’s grief, and there’s making them into your cross to bear.” She huddled deeper in her blankets, saying after a few moments’ pause, “And I see you beating yourself up about it already at the hospital. How you are around Tomas.” 

The name easily enough called the image of the dying man to mind. Terminal lung cancer, twenty-two and he looked three times that. The coughing, the spit with near-black chunks of old blood, and the blue face as he strangled for air, reminded Haymitch too much of miners dying from black lung. For all the morphling and a trained doctor and all that, some things were impossible with what they had. Cancer was one of those: nothing to be done for Tomas except try to make him comfortable as he died. An orphan who hadn’t married and had no sweetheart, barely lived yet, little more than a child, but dying alone. Friends had visited briefly and then left, obviously uncomfortable with the incongruity of dying like that, so young. It made him think too much of Finnick, whose own life had been robbed from him. “Saying I shouldn’t care?” he asked her, trying to keep his voice even, though part of him wanted to start shouting. 

“No. But I don’t want you to tear yourself to pieces over it. People die. If you keep working in that hospital, they’re certainly gonna die. You’ll see kids in pain, maybe even some who won’t make it. And if that’s just going to hit you right in the raw spots…”

“I can watch people die,” he said, hearing the harsh edge to his words. “Kill them too, at that. Yes. Kids getting hurt, it gets to me. That poor bastard Tomas gets to me. Nobody should die alone like that.”

“We all die alone, though.”

“You? You who sat there and held my hand while I was bleeding out?” He shook his head. “Not buying it, darlin’. All right, you want to argue semantics, we all die alone, but no need to die totally forsaken.”

She breathed out deeply, a long sigh. “You tried to pull me out of the worst when this war started by being honest. So, here’s me returning the favor. If you want to help at the hospital because you think you can do some good there, that’s fine. But if it’s from some sense of… _atonement_ or whatever, I’m not gonna let you do it. Because it’ll never be enough for you to feel clean again, will it? And you’ll lose more along the way, and hurt more for everything you see and…I know you can put up a wall between you and other people, all right? But there’s got to be some middle ground between shutting it all out and taking everyone’s pain on yourself. You should care, but you can’t drown in it. And if you can’t do that, I’m not gonna to watch you kill yourself by inches by hurting for everyone. I can’t. The kids can’t.” 

It cut deeper than her snarky quips of before would have. But he had to admit the truth in it. “Right now, it’s where I need to be. It’s not atonement, exactly. It’s more….I don’t know, redemption. Proving something to myself, not to everyone else.” That he could do more than kill people or fail to save them or send them to their deaths, be part of that half that had long since been missing. “And being there, seeing that people hurting and dying really is something I can’t always fix and that it’s—lack of a better word, let’s say ‘normal’—maybe I need that too.”

“Balance, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“All right. But if I think you’re in too deep, I reserve the right to bring it up again.”

“Fair,” he acknowledged. It felt like a good place to leave it, plus the fire had fully guttered out and his eyelids felt heavy. Keeping the quilt pulled around his shoulders, he asked, “Ready for bed?” No matter how rough each day could be, she’d be there beside him at night, and they’d go past the kids’ rooms, kids he’d managed to keep safe and protect. It was a good start.

Morning, as ever, came far too early, and stoking up the wood-burning stove to make breakfast was a pain in the ass. But they managed it, drinking coffee even as they cooked. Madge and Vick, the early risers, would help rouse the others. The routine was well down by now. And despite the trials of cooking, there was still a keen pleasure in the simple luxury of choice. If they wanted bacon or sausage, they could pick, rather than having it simply slapped on their metal trays like in Thirteen. 

“They’re holding the midwinter shindig,” Johanna told him, grabbing the mug of coffee he slid down the counter to her, resuming flipping the bacon in the cast-iron skillet while he cracked the eggs. Feeding at least seven people, and frequently eleven, was a learning process. Even as a kid, he’d only had to worry about three at once. He spared a moment to hope that everything was well with Ash in Eight. They’d recruited Ash to the rebellion, but he wouldn’t let himself imagine more, torment his mind and soul wondering how much his brother did or didn’t remember, whether Ash even cared he had a brother anymore. He turned that thought from his mind forcefully and focused instead on Johanna’s words. “Every year—by the middle of February everyone’s getting a bit stir-crazy with the snow, so it’s a good chance to get together, burn off some steam, do some dancing. Clear off one of the mill floors for the evening so it’s out of the cold.”

“Does this little mid-February gathering of yours also involve your ‘quaintly charming Seven cultural ritual of exchanging elaborately cut and folded handcrafted paper valentines’?” he assumed Claudius Templesmith’s accent, raising an eyebrow and laughing at the fierce glare she shot him, but the smile on her lips told him she was enjoying this as well. “Hey, I saw ‘An Unfolding Of the Heart’…twice, no less.” Jubilation had loved the damn thing, chirping about the beautiful romantic gesture from District Seven and heaving melodramatic sighs about how she wished they could be together in February rather than only in midsummer. 

Johanna rolled her eyes, but she snickered right along with him. “And of course a Templesmith documentary about the simple folk _must_ be true. You gonna buy me a dozen roses, and a big box of chocolates too?”

“Oh, roses and chocolates are so Eleven, and I’m a Twelve boy, so it’s gotta be a diamond,” he said dryly. “Can’t tell you how many times I got asked about all those diamonds we apparently hack out of the walls of the coal mines.”

She grinned that wolfish smile of hers one more time, but then said, “But seriously, be good to get Peeta and Madge out and doing something fun—they’re sitting around the house too much except when we force ‘em out the door. Don’t want either of them becoming weird depressed hermits.”

“And we know a bit about that, don’t we?” he asked, tone deliberately light, but his eyes met hers as he drank down the last of the coffee, seeing the troubled look there. Yeah, he’d noticed the gathering pall of gloom over both of them since they’d arrived here. Wasn’t like he’d imagined just a change of scenery from Thirteen would magically cure everything, but seeing them withdraw more and more, it was like watching himself as a teenager all over again, feeling a sick sense of deja vu. “All right. We’ll get ‘em out the door for an evening. Vick, might be old enough for it, but Peeta and Madge for sure. But be careful we don’t push Madge too much. Teenagers can be little shits just on principle, and besides, those kids didn’t come back from that canyon…their folks probably died in the executions, but might be cousins and the like that are still bitter.” That was the worst part of the Tour—being forced to publicly confront the families of all the dead kids. Madge had killed some, he wasn’t sure which, but even those who hadn’t died by her hand might resent that she’d survived when so many others hadn’t. 

He heard the sound of footsteps behind him and turned abruptly, instincts as ever wanting to reach for the knife on the counter from slicing the bread—right, like he’d kill anything with a bread knife. He saw Madge standing there, brow furrowed, watching them both. “I’m not made of glass, you know.”

“Uh…” Johanna stammered. 

“I heard that,” Madge said, but it came out as more of a confused astonishment than a bitter accusation. “Well, sort of.”


	43. Chapter 43

“Ready!” The yell came from Johanna, crouched down at the end of the spigot and eyeing the bucket at her feet where the boiled-down sap drained out. They’d spent several hours already watching the clear sap boil down in the steel trough over the fire--by this time the air ran thickly with the sticky-sweet scent of boiling sugar and the earthy, smoky scent of burning wood. As Johanna grabbed the bucket and went to put it in the copper boiling kettle to finish turning it into syrup, Peeta lugged another bucket of the thin sap and dumped it into the trough, turning for another bucket brought by Haymitch, and Madge grabbed the empty and went to go fill it again from the wagonload brought in by the sappers. All around them, others worked as a team in the process, handling their own firepit and trough.

They’d done this already for a week, ever since the days finally cracked above freezing while the nights still plummeted down, tapping the maples and birches around the winter town for their thin, nearly tasteless sap, bringing it down for what the locals called “the sugaring”. Apparently, as Gunnar had explained it, every year Seven made maple syrup in those late winter weeks before they could head back out to their lumber camps. 

Johanna came back, grabbing a handful of clean snow and rubbing it across her face. With the heavy hauling and the hot fires, all of them were sweating, jackets open despite the chilly day. But she grinned anyway, looking at Madge. “Wait till you taste real syrup, kiddo. After all that fake shit you’ve been eating all your life. That’s just corn syrup and maple flavoring someone cooked up in Three.” Victors, of course, got the real stuff. 

He saw Madge pausing in her dumping the bucket, focusing intently on Johanna’s words, head cocked aside so that her good left ear faced Johanna better. The right was still stone-deaf, so she said, but the left came back enough for her to hear. _It’s still a bit like someone’s yelling the words through a pane of glass sometimes,_ she told him with resignation, _but I’m getting faster at processing it._ But Madge grinned back at Johanna, making it obvious she’d followed right along. “My grandparents used to give me maple candy sometimes. But I’ve never had it as actual syrup.”

“You mean Rab and Faydre?” Haymitch asked, dumping another bucket and then pausing, glancing over at Madge with that inscrutable look he had. Madge nodded in return, putting her bucket down in the snow for a moment and stretching out her back. He turned to Johanna and told her, “They ran the sweet shop in Twelve.” Another pause, and he said, so soft that Peeta barely heard it: “Maysilee Donner’s folks.”

“Ah,” Johanna said, equally soft, nodding and glancing towards Madge. “Well,” she said, pitching her voice louder again for Madge’s benefit, “we won’t have to turn ninety-eight percent of our syrup over to the Capitol like always,” and Peeta heard a laughing cheer from someone over at the next kettle at that, “but I’m sure my dad will still make maple candy. Always did when Bern and Heike and I were kids.” Now her grin turned a little bit sheepish as she shoved more wood into the fire. “Gotta say, even the last year I went, I still enjoyed the candy more than the sugaring dance.”

Haymitch barked out a laugh at that as they all paused around the refilled trough. “Gotta love your priorities, darlin’.”

“Well,” she said, flicking a glance and a smirk at Haymitch over her shoulder, “I won’t be standing there holding up the walls this year, will I?”

“It’s an important job,” Haymitch deadpanned. Then his eyes moved over and rested on Peeta. “But no mind to that anyway, those dances really aren’t for our sort. Newlyweds or not, that means we’re just another boring married couple at this point.”

“Speak for yourself on that,” she said with a snort of amusement. Her gaze lighted on Madge, though, and she said, “Fair point, though. Those things really are more fun for the kids.” She smiled a bit wryly. “Assuming you’ve got someone to dance with, anyway.” There was a wistful tone to it, and he could imagine that teenage Johanna, the sixteen-year-old girl he’d seen in recaps of the 66th Games, awkwardly waiting in that mill while it seemed like everyone around her had begun to figure it out, hoping to find some way to talk to a boy she desperately wanted.

He’d never get the chance now with Katniss. No dance for them underneath a summer moon--although merchants never really went to those Seam gatherings anyway. For merchies, they all knew each other, small group that it was, and it was more or less known and understood who they’d marry. No awkward flirtations, no worries, no uncertainties. He was the third son of the bakery, the one who’d never inherit the business, and been virtually promised to Delly, part of why they’d stuck together so much as kids and become friends. Second daughter herself, so they would have had to find a new business--they’d actually talked about starting up the sweet shop again that died out for lack of heirs. They’d always made better friends than anything, and even without his hopeless love for Katniss, it seemed like Delly was best friend and practically his sister, not his would-be lover. He could only hope that she was OK back in Twelve, that Snow had no idea about that supposed bargain struck between the Mellarks and the Cartwrights, or that he considered it pointless given Katniss.

He’d never asked Madge who she’d been promised to--who did the mayor’s daughter marry? Depended on whether or not she wanted to be mayor herself, he supposed, and felt the guilty embarrassment of never having asked. But it all seemed like another life, back in Twelve, when he was a son of the bakery and she was the mayor’s daughter, and a quiet life in the merchie quarter was what they both could expect out of life. A life before Katniss became more than an impossible fantasy, and before even the hope of it being something real got ripped away from him. Before she lost Gale too, and whatever potential he’d had for her--another thing he hadn’t asked. Watching her now, tucking her blond hair back underneath her ragged black knit cap, he could only think that there was a lot he hadn’t asked. Too many still-raw wounds in both of them. Too much that still stuck in his throat, because it was stuck in his heart. Turning away, he headed over to grab another bucket of sap, grateful for the excuse of the work, and the easy camaraderie of it.

He stood in the ration queue with Magnolia the next morning, both of them already in the line shortly after dawn. Here in the bustling heart of things, the streets were cobblestone, and damp with the melt, the sunlight glinted off of them. Much like back in Twelve with the Seam, further away from the square and the handful of official Capitol buildings--the Justice Building, Peacekeeper HQ, and the Ration Board included--the streets turned to tamped-down dirt, a morass of mud now with the thawing snow and ice. Though at least here in Seven they built elevated wooden sidewalks to deal with it, and back in Twelve, a merchie boy like him wouldn’t have ventured down into the Seam all that often, let alone the most miserably poor parts in the West Seam, lowest in elevation both in terms of geography and social strata. Magnolia--and Haymitch too--had been Westies, and he glanced over at the woman by his side, trying to imagine her mining coal and raising two sons alone. A real mother--only Madge seemed to understand the lack, and even with her, it was because her mother was slowly drifting away down a river of morphling, not that she loathed the very sight of her own child. Although it was all the same in the end, wasn’t it? Jinny Mellark, Maribelle Donner--unable to withstand the reality they lived it. And Liam Mellark and Jarron Undersee, the men who wouldn’t stand up to them. As if she could read his thoughts, Magnolia glanced his way and smiled at him slightly. “We’ll go home and make some tea, eh?” she asked. “I keep feeling the cold more every year. Rheumatism. Guess it was all the damp in the mines, all those years.” She grinned sheepishly. “Phin and I both commiserate on it.”

Something so comfortable in the way she said it, long years of familiarity and affection, despite their apparent rough and ragged start. “Wouldn’t mind it,” he acknowledged. The late winter damp seemed to seep into his legs, his stumps sometimes aching as if the amputated ends of the bones somehow lay in there still raw and painful. 

The line moved briskly. Everyone was at least familiar with the ration queue, and Thirteen taking over for the Capitol hadn’t changed anything on the process. The fact that the portions were so much larger, though, kept the worst of the griping down. Well, that and the propos from Thirteen oh-so-passive-aggressively reminding those in the free districts that half the nation still suffered under Capitol bondage, with the implication that they could damn well shut up their ingratitude if they wanted to complain about the current system. 

“Oranges again,” the woman ahead of them sighed with something close to bliss, grey-streaked brown hair peeking out from her blue knit cap, clutching her ration box. “Never had an orange in my life till this winter.”

“Enjoy ‘em, Serrotina,” Sabina the supplymaster advised, brown eyes already turning back to the ledger, thumbing through the pages with her right hand missing the little finger from an apparent lumbering accident, “that’s the last you’ll get till next fall. Eleven’s all tapped out on citrus. Not growing all the out-of-season shit in their greenhouses as usual like they would for Capitol demand. Busy fighting a war and all this past fall, right?”

Serrotina shrugged and gave a cluck of her tongue, adjusting her grip on the box. “No complaints on my end. Better me and mine enjoying a few oranges after eating carrion out in the woods than feeding the Capitol pigs as usual, eh?”

Sabina chuckled, eyes narrowing in crinkles of amusement. “No argument. Bet they’re all tightening their fancy belts this winter.” 

Magnolia gave a low murmur at that. Peeta glanced over at her, but she said nothing outright. They both knew the information coming in from the Capitol, now that Peeta and Madge had joined up with the intelligencers, deciphering and recording and receiving reports. Easy for them to do as a way to help, given neither of them could handle a rifle--and he was under no illusions Haymitch would ever allow either of them to go fight anyway at this point. It was better this way now, with something useful to do, and how much intel passed through now and needed to be compiled and analyzed--the scope of just how many eyes and ears the Peacekeeper spy ring had out in the field, in all corners of Panem, still amazed him.

People in the Capitol stood in ration queues now too, just like the districts they’d oppressed. And just like the poor districts, they now received a few miserable cupfuls of grain, some mealy potatoes, and the like. Objectively, there was a certain sense of balancing the scales to that, but he couldn’t say whether the satisfaction it inspired in people was rooted in justice or vengeance. Left unable to say for sure, it stayed dug into him, nagging like a deeply seated splinter. Maybe the divide between the two was simply a razor’s edge rather than a vast divide, and that notion couldn’t help but trouble him. If they became no better than the Capitol, or even Thirteen with its seemingly equal lack of value on anyone’s life or existence as a human being, what the hell were they fighting for anyway?

“Fog, Mason, Mellark, Hawthorne, Amsell, and Abernathy,” Magnolia told Sabina as they stepped forward.

Well used to various members of their much-blended family coming by to sign--and it wasn’t like they weren’t all well known by the public anyway--Sabina pushed the book towards Magnolia. “Sign away, Maggie.” Thirteen would probably have a fit if they knew she let people pick up for other families instead of insisting someone from that family sign for it, but he’d seen that Seven liked to cheerfully thumb their nose at the rules where possible. Even as Magnolia scrawled, Sabina glanced over her shoulder at her clerks, sending them to go grab the pre-packaged rations based on age and sex. “That’s one kinder, one kiddle, one tweenie male, two adult male, two adult female, four seniors.” In a matter of about thirty seconds the various bags were stowed in two ration crates, and the two of them were on their way with the rations for the next three days. The Capitol issued rations every week, and Peeta suspected they did it that often only so if a worker was injured, dead, or hadn’t met quota, the Capitol wouldn’t have given over more than a few days of “unearned” food. In contrast, Thirteen wouldn’t trust them with more than three days’ rations at once. Probably figured it would encourage hoarding. 

“Might as well go ahead and enjoy the oranges while we can,” Magnolia said, thumping a gloved hand on the box that she carried. “Not as though you can freeze the juice, power being off and all, and it’s not something that cans like apples do.”

“We’ve got enough butter on hand. So...I could make some orange rolls for breakfast tomorrow,” he said thoughtfully, already salivating a bit at the thought of pillowy soft dough and an orange glaze. 

She grinned over at him. “There’s a good lad.”

Spending the evening after dinner working on it was a pleasure, alone with the simple, almost meditative exercise of kneading the dough, rolling it, slicing the rolls, and leaving them on the counter, covered by a cloth. He’d proof them tomorrow morning when the stove was lit and the warmth was there for the yeast to respond. The house itself was too cold for it now that the Capitol had cut the powerlines from Five to Seven. 

Coming downstairs in the morning for the proofing, he heard the low voices from the kitchen, Haymitch and Johanna already at work cooking. Something in Johanna’s tone aside from the sharp anger made him pause in the hallway as he heard, “...this fucking Thirteen system of what people _deserve_.”

Creeping closer, trying his best to put his feet carefully and not make any sound--no mean feat, given he’d always been lead-footed even when his feet were flesh and bone--he somehow managed to get close to the kitchen door. Whether that was his success in stealth or the two of them simply being caught up in the conversation, he didn’t know. Haymitch stayed silent for a few moments, Peeta’s heart hammering hard. “Too many people who deserved a lot more than they got, Hanna. And plenty that got more than many and never bothered to acknowledge it. Easy to see that when you’re a walking exercise in misery.” Another pause, and the words came out slow and deliberate as he said, “You worrying that now we’ve got more than we deserved, you and me? That the world gave a bit too much back and what it’ll take when the time comes to pay for it?”

Madge probably wouldn’t have been able to hear Johanna’s low, anguished, “Yeah.” As was, Peeta strained to hear it. “Yeah, sometimes. How can I not worry? My parents, my siblings, you, the kids--it feels like too much to trust it to stick. And you and I both know that it’s worse when someone else pays the price and you’re the one left behind to watch it happen.”

He’d felt that too, with Katniss, for a while. The elation of feeling so close to hear, the bonds between them drawing tighter and closer, but all the while, guilty with the knowledge that twenty-two kids died for them to have that chance. Wondering too if somehow, the world would make him pay, because he didn’t deserve her, didn’t deserve to be happy. He’d lost her in the arena--it felt like her life was the cost exacted for his hubris in daring to hope, in ignoring that they’d bought that chance in blood. Delly had a book of old, old mythology where people were usually struck down for daring to challenge the gods. Maybe that had happened, and he’d been left behind to suffer the loss.

Haymitch sighed heavily. “I know. Ain’t easy being happy sometimes.”

“Boy’s beating himself up over Katniss still, I think. Probably thinks she died because he wanted too much with her, because he tried to be happy after the Games with her, or maybe even because he got the ball rolling with that interview in the first place.” Apparently Haymitch hurried skewed away from himself and Johanna and their unease, and seized on another topic. Peeta felt his cheeks surge with heat at that, brisk against the chill air of the house. It was as if Haymitch could sense him right there, thinking those same thoughts, but that was stupid. Still, to be that easily read was unnerving, given how many years he’d spent instinctively learning to hide, evade, and conceal his feelings as a matter of survival.

“She died because of Coriolanus fucking Snow,” Johanna said briskly, and he heard the clatter of a cast-iron pot on the stove.

“I know that. Hell, _he_ knows that. I knew it was Snow that killed Briar--or at least supposedly did, whatever--but there’s knowing and there’s believing.”

“Do you believe it too, on Katniss? We both know you blame yourself for her dying. Another tribute you couldn’t save.”

“I’m trying, Hanna,” he told her quietly. “Hand me the coffee, all right?” 

“I know. But she’s dead. Finn’s dead. And it’s not like my mom and dad and Bern and Heike being alive made it all magically go away. All the patrons, all the guilt, all the people I screwed over or pushed away. All the shitty, rotten stuff. It took root, good and solid.” He heard the sound of the hand-cranked coffee grinder, and the two of them raising their voices slightly to be heard over it. For his part, Peeta breathed a sigh of relief at the additional noise, but stayed pressed tightly against the wall, hardly daring breathe too loud. “It doesn’t all disappear just because something better showed up for once.”

“No, it doesn’t. You deal better if you’ve got some cause for hope, though. Him and Madge?” Peeta’s cheeks seemed to burn even hotter, if that was possible, and he barely bit back a noise of surprise.

“Yep. Is he hanging back out of guilt or grief or fear of what people will think, anyway?”

“Why should they think the first fucking thing about it?” The bang of something as if Haymitch had smacked the coffee grinder down on the counter--whether to knock clumps of grounds loose or out of irritation, Peeta couldn’t know.

“C’mon. You’ve handled enough spin to not be this naive. He supposedly watched his beloved wife, pregnant with their child--mind, and I love the kid to death but for fuck’s sake, secret wedding and secret baby, that’s a piece of melodrama straight from a Capitol serial--”

”So of course the Capitol lapped it right up and reacted just the way we wanted,” Haymitch said dryly. “You somehow kept a straight face on stage, I noticed.”

“Mainly because I wasn’t sure whether to laugh my ass off at him being smart and that obviously a teenager, or the Capitol for being that dumb. Your plan with him, I assume?”

“Yeah.” Haymitch’s voice went softer. “Look, don’t tease him about it, all right? It was a plan, but it meant something to him. Packaged it as cheap melodrama the way we pulled the Capitol’s strings, but honestly, that was all he wanted. Just her, and a family with her. And he could pretend for a few minutes onstage that he was a husband and a dad, before he aimed to go off and die.” They’d talked about it, over and over, the night before the interviews. Knowing they had to pull something impressive out, even more than the old “star crossed lovers” story, to gain the nation’s attention, and more important, the sponsors. Peeta initially suggested the idea, trying to sound casual, even as he struggled to let go the image in his head of her, and kids, and the happy life they’d never have. Trying to not be a seventeen-year-old boy resigned to die, who’d had only chaste nights of snuggling and some kisses--none that he could be sure were real, but the one on the beach, that had felt real--and countless times stroking himself in overwhelming longing and frustration with the image of Katniss hot in his mind. Painting his portrait as a husband and father, and selling it as strategy, but secretly glad that to the eyes of the world, he’d be that person, if only for a little while. It unnerved him now to be that easily read, and at the same time, touched him that Haymitch, as grumpy and cynical as he could seem, had actually been that kind to recognize it and not make some dismissive, asshole remark. He’d been on edge enough those days in the Capitol that he’d blasted both Peeta and Katniss more than once. That level of frustration and stress made sense now, given all the plans he’d been hiding.

“I’m not heartless enough to taunt him with anything about her. Fuck’s sake, Hay. But that took their little story to another level, and it’s got ripples. He may be holding back some--I’d say he’s a lot more aware than she was of how perception works, yeah?” Haymitch murmured something that must have been agreement. “He might worry what people will say if they find out. One of the nation’s supposed great lovers loses his pregnant wife, and then less than a year later, he’s taking up with another woman.” It was almost too much to listen to the two of them, talking about all of this so openly, and feeling like they’d flayed him open and yanked out the dark, painful growth knotted up inside of him, examining and discussing it, when he’d been so convinced it was a secret. All at once it was mingled shame and relief. He still missed Katniss, but Haymitch and Gunnar had helped him deal with some of it. The grief would always remain, and he’d always miss her. But lately the guilt at the idea of a life beyond her had receded some, replaced by the fear of what people would say if he let himself be happy with Madge. 

“To hell with what they think, and I’ll tell them that,” Haymitch said bluntly. “I spent twenty-five years beating myself up over Briar from guilt, not love. Annie and Cash, they’ve managed to make something together, and she lost Finnick in an even more fucked-up way. Besides, it’s more a Capitol conceit that you get one great romance and then your life is over. District folks know better. Sometimes you do what you have to do to survive--and not just physically. All that matters is what the two of them want, and what helps.”

“And if Plutarch wants a touching propo about inspirational romance between the Boy The Girl On Fire Left Behind and the Victor of the 76th Hunger Games?”

“If Plutarch or anyone else tries to make something of it, I swear I’ll find those fucking squirrels they put in my arena and lock ‘em in a room together.” There was no humor in Haymitch’s voice as he said it, and remembering the lingering, voyeuristic shots from the Quell highlights of bloody, stripped bones left in the wake of those squirrels, Peeta suppressed a rough shudder. But at the same time, a little thrill of satisfaction and relief went through him at the notion of having someone who’d fight for him, who’d defend him, that fiercely. “They know the kids are off limits.” 

“You know I’ll be right there throwing squirrels with you,” Johanna said with the air of a promise. Peeta heard Haymitch’s low, throaty laugh at that. 

Though Haymitch said something next, voice gone too low for Peeta to catch more than, “...any more propos ...Katniss...simpler...forget…” He took a guess: _They’re not doing any more propos about Katniss anyway, it’s a simpler message if they just let everyone forget her._

Quietly he crept back away from the kitchen door. Easier for the war and the message if everyone in Panem forgot Katniss, but he never could. He doubted Haymitch ever would either, or Johanna. But loyalty to a memory didn’t necessarily mean faithfulness to a ghost. He’d seen where that led his father, deliberately sacrificing the reality of his life, and those who so urgently needed him, on an altar of his pure, eternal love for Perulla Banner. Gunnar warned him about ruining everyone around him with that mentality, and he’d just heard Haymitch say so bluntly that he’d spent a quarter century more or less married only to his fear and his guilt. A very private man, Haymitch, probably always would be, but Peeta could see the difference in him already, especially around Johanna. The brightness and kindness to him was subtle, but it was there, the sense of a growing inner happiness that warred against the constant glum darkness that had been there so long.

He wanted that so desperately some days, to believe that there could be any kind of hope at the end of a dark and fearful journey. And the guilt still lingered, that he’d lived, and she hadn’t. But that was the Capitol, and Snow, and maybe even Plutarch, and a hefty dose of pure misfortune. It wasn’t his fault, or Johanna’s or Finnick’s or Haymitch’s. 

He found Madge outside reading, as he knew he would. She woke up early, before Posy and Lindy, and usually came out onto the porch with a book for some quiet time. “Orange rolls in process?” she said, looking up at him with a flicker of a smile on her lips.

“Crap,” he said, realizing he’d totally forgotten about the rolls, caught in the moment of listening to Haymitch and Johanna. “They were...ah...talking.” Awkwardly as he said it, it probably sounded like he’d caught them making out, or worse, in the kitchen. “It sounded like a private conversation, so I didn’t want to interrupt.” Good thing his burning cheeks and ears could be chalked up to the chilly air, because it was a blatant lie. He’d learned young with his parents that careful eavesdropping could make the difference between cluelessly bungling into violence and cautiously staying at a safe distance. Maybe the old habit never wore off.

The slight smile widened, and that gaze looked at him knowingly. She’d never be like Katniss, an impenetrable stone wall one minute, the next all fire and impulse. Madge was something calmer, steadier, more driven by her mind than by her emotions. For Madge, the emotions were there all the same, and he wouldn’t want her to be like Katniss anyway, and she wasn’t, she was all right talking about feelings, turning them over and examining them. Katniss had always wanted to just experience them, experience life with a growing zeal, never analyze her feelings too much. He suspected Madge wouldn’t want him to be like Gale either, brooding and passionate by turns. Maybe fire was what Haymitch had needed, and he’d found it in Johanna, but perhaps both of them needed something different this time around. Maybe what he needed was a cooling wind--a breath of fresh air. 

He sat down beside her, wishing he could draw his knees up in the chair like she did, but the stiff artificial knees never cooperated well for that. She put her book aside neatly. “I can’t make any promises.” No passionate vows to force her to a response, no television interviews with dramatic pronouncements of love, no story to give about how thought he’d adored her before he even knew what love was. “I’m not ready for that. I don’t even know for sure exactly what I feel yet with you. But I’m still here. And you’re one of the few that knows what it’s been like. And I don’t want to be alone and scared forever.” He’d clung to Katniss as his talisman for years, his absurd and unrealistic ideal of what love should be. He wouldn’t dishonor the real, flesh-and-blood girl he’d come to love and sometimes hate by turning her memory into some pure unmatchable angel, denying her who she’d really been every bit as much as the Capitol had. She’d never wanted to be a symbol. Not to him, not to the nation, not to anyone. “So, will you dance with me this weekend?” he asked, giving her an awkward grin and adding, “Because I’ll warn you now, I won’t feel it if I step on your toes.” 

She reached out, her hand on his, head cocked aside slightly now to hear him, in that way she’d likely always have. “If you don’t mind if I get dizzy and have to stop.” Her smile now held all the warmth of the sun, touching something inside him and kindling it just that bit higher.

~~~~~~~~~~

There must have been dances like this in the years she’d shut herself away up in the house in the Glade, but for a moment, stepping into the mill, it was like time was a ribbon that stitched itself from the present right back to the winter of 66, the end of childhood, and so all the dark and ugly and ragged parts in between dropped out of sight, looped beneath it all as though they hadn’t existed. It cleared in a moment though, as she shook her head as if to physically knock that notion loose.

The sound of the fiddle and accordion and clapping hands and thumping boots, the sharp-sweet smell of the sawdust laid fresh on the floor, the dim industrial lights and the whirl of color in a skirt or bandana or shirt as people had dressed in some of their brightest to help celebrate the coming spring. It was all the same, practically timeless--her parents, and even her grandparents, must have been to these teasingly dubbed “sawmill balls”. Ulm, her grandpa, had fallen in love with Johanna’s long-dead Oma Kirsten at a dance just like this. Her mom and dad must have been to dances like this--though now she wondered with the sharply acute sense of empathy if they’d stayed home those long years too when both of them had given up on love, marriage, family. Gunnar might joke about how despite being at least a decade older than most Seven grooms that Petra’s family had put him through the sawblade, but now she had to think there was pain behind it, her grandparents trying to protect Petra from even more hurt. 

Thinking those thoughts, obviously she wasn’t the naive sixteen-year-old girl who’d been to that long-ago dance and stayed on the sidelines, overlooked and crestfallen. Not even the girl-woman who’d been grateful the next winter that nobody asked her to dance, not wanting anyone’s hands on her--stupidly ignorant of far worse to come that next summer--and instead trying to sneak some of the hot punch, pleased with the alcoholic kick of the blend of spruce gin, maple syrup, and apple cider, feeling dangerously grown-up and defying anyone to tell her she couldn’t have the booze.

Glancing over towards the drinks table as they shrugged off their coats and tagged them, stuffing her hat in her coat pocket, she saw they had the big polished oak punchbowl out and filled, presumably with more cooking up over the fire right outside. “The punch is pretty boozy,” she murmured to Haymitch, putting a hand on his shoulder and leaning in to say it to him quietly. “They’ve got ordinary hot maple cider, though.” She didn’t mention it was usually meant for the teens.

“Thanks,” he returned equally quietly, eyes scanning the crowd. A faint fear that he’d get pissed at her acting like that, on his first big public outing with alcohol since actually committing to going sober, eased and unknotted within her. The fact he didn’t perk up at the mention of the alcohol helped too. It was one thing for him to ask her to clear out the bottles from the house, and to avoid buying spruce gin from back behind Cutty McIvor’s house, but another entirely to be here where the punch flowed easily and a drink was seen as something so casual, unremarkable.

She didn’t sense his eyes and his attention wandering over there, but best to not risk it anyway. Besides, there was a sense of pleasure and maybe even a sort of defiant joy in showing up to one of these shindigs, knowing full well this time she wouldn’t stand alongside the edges, one of them and yet shut out, and separate. 

She glanced back at Peeta and Madge, and their parents--Vick, Posy, and Lindy were staying with the kid-minders for the few hours of the dance, and it would probably do them some good to get time to socialize and play with other kids their own ages, Lindy in particular since she didn’t have school to go to yet. She grabbed Haymitch’s hand and tugged him after her, drawing him out among the dancers. It struck her only after to wonder if he knew these dances, if Seven and Twelve were different, but he adjusted smoothly enough, and the giddy whirl of it filling her mind and heart, and there was the answering shine in Haymitch’s eyes, the broad grin he couldn’t quite hide.

It felt good. It felt almost too good to trust, too simple and ordinary a pleasure, as if this was just another dance with her husband, like it had always been that way. To be there, like she was in the infirmary every day, at the shops, and be treated no differently than any other ordinary Seven woman. Not Victor 66, their uncomfortably vicious and angry local celebrity, and not the Phoenix, a distant marble statue to be admired but never known, never treated as human. To be among them and blend in smoothly, unremarkably, felt like cool, soothing ointment on a burn that had hurt for years. They finally took a break for a drink, Haymitch wandering over to go grab a couple of the cups of cider. She plunked down in a chair near where her in-laws sat, watching Madge and Peeta talking animatedly with some of the other local kids. “Not gonna dance?” she asked Magnolia.

Phineas gave an irritated scowl, but something in his eyes gentled as he looked over towards Magnolia. “Damn hip hurts me too much for it, but if you want to, dear,” he told her, and the awkward hesitancy in his manner, hidden behind the mask of brusque nonchalance, reminded her painfully of Haymitch.

Haymitch handed her the cider and she sipped it, relieved that they hadn’t screwed with him by way of pranking welcome and instead handed over two cups of the gin punch. They probably would have thought it was nothing to give a known drunk the boozy version--living up to expectations, that was all. “So why don’t you be a good son and give your mom a dance, huh?” She elbowed Haymitch in the arm pointedly as he finished his own drink. 

Haymitch’s gaze at her betrayed the flicker of understanding, and he nodded slightly to her. As Haymitch followed Magnolia out, she turned to Phineas and said casually, “Don’t know how to dance, huh?”

The scowl probably had looked terrifying on a middle-aged Head Peacekeeper. On an eighty-year-old man, it looked almost sad, like a worn-out old hound baring its teeth, but the way his eyes kept wistfully straying over to Magnolia said plenty besides. “Not much occasion to learn in the Peacehome, or at boot camp,” he said abruptly, tipping up the last of his cup. “We learned unarmed combat and rifle drill.” Another of those curious pangs hit her, recognizing someone else left on the edges watching, wanting to taste the fullness of life but denied it. There must have been dances in District Twelve that he could never go to, never belong, never take her hand there in front of everyone. They never taught Peacekeeper kids to dance. Why would they need it? They’d marry late, if at all, and like everything else, their marriages seemed ruthlessly practical. Not much room for dances and flirtations and enjoyment there. 

“Fine. So get your ass out of the chair, come to the side here,” she nodded towards one of the relatively unoccupied corners back towards where they’d shoved the machinery for the night, “avoid the saws, and learn a few steps so you get to dance with your wife for once in your life. There’ll be at least one waltz later. Nice and slow.”

“You’d have made a good Peacekeeper yourself, taking no shit as you do,” and when she shot him a look, he dryly assured her, albeit with a slightly awkward expression, “It’s a compliment, girl.”

“You’d have learned a waltz or two anyway, growing up here,” she argued, not quite above twisting his arm a little bit. It was only pushing him for what he seemed to want anyway. “So really, it’s you taking back something the Capitol took from you, isn’t it? Why not do that, oh wise rebel spy leader?” She gave him a sweet grin beneath wide, innocent eyes.

He gave an amused grunt at that, pushing up from his chair, obviously sensing the battle was lost. “Good thing you’re well matched,” nodding towards Haymitch, “since you’d get bored with someone who can’t keep up.”

He proved a quick student, mind still keen and body still holding the last traces of a lithe, energetic grace to it. Looking at him, she had the thought that this was much how Haymitch would be in forty years himself--older, slower, body declining, but not done yet by any means, eyes still shrewd and clever. Somehow the thought of Haymitch as a formidable old fart reassured her. 

She quickly handed Phineas over to his wife when she heard the slower three-step chords of a waltz and caught up with Haymitch again. “Ready to head out?” she asked. The teens and the courting folks and those who had older kids were here tonight, living it up almost defiantly after their ordeal as woodswalkers, but they could afford to stay up later. She saw people who she presumed had younger kids slipping out already. They’d had their dances, and it felt so damn good, but the reality pressed in now. Her parents, or Haymitch’s, had said they’d make sure Madge and Peeta got home OK. But she’d had enough for the night. Sometimes it still felt far too easy to overdo it and the presence of others, which had been a comfort, suddenly became stifling. Besides, Posy and Lindy needed to be put to bed, and they still woke often enough with bad dreams and fears that she didn’t want them in the strange house of the kid-minder if that happened. 

“Sure,” he answered, and they retrieved their coats, slipping away without ceremony or fuss. She glanced back one last time to see Peeta dancing with Madge, and couldn’t hold back a smile. Walking home through the Cut, the section of town dedicated to the mills and workshops, the raw, half-chemical, half-organic scent of the paper mill didn’t float through the winter air as it had throughout her childhood. They were dedicating far more of the wood supply to firewood for the free districts, and the demand for paper was far less anyway. 

“Had a good time?” she asked. Walking away from the party, leaving behind the light and music and laughter, an odd sense of melancholy came over her.

“Yeah.” They walked close to another block in relative silence. “Been a while,” he said softly. He couldn’t mean since he went to a party and danced. He’d been popular on the circuit, been dragged to any number of posh gatherings as someone’s arm candy, danced with any number of Capitolites. One of the first ones she’d been to, all those years ago, they’d obligated him to demonstrate knife throwing skills with her as the target. Those parties were an ordeal, not a pleasure.

“Since you were a kid?” she asked.

“Seventeen.”

“Me too.” She cast back to that conversation all the way back in Nine. “Played the fiddle at someone’s wedding, you said?” She wondered if she’d ever hear him play someday, thinking of it with some wistfulness.

“I did.” He jammed his hands in his pockets, awkwardly half-turning away from her. “Not gonna ask me to play at the next dance, are you?”

“Hadn’t crossed my mind. Why?”

“The fiddle, that’s mine,” he said lowly, but the force of feeling was in his words all the same, clear and almost angry. “If I want to play for me, or for you, or the kids, or maybe even a friend’s wedding or the like...but I’m not gonna be a fucking party trick people expect to perform on cue just because I can. Never again. That’s why I never told the Capitol I could play.” 

“I wouldn’t ask it,” she snapped back, feeling strangely hurt that he’d assume she’d throw him to the forest cats like that. “And hell, why do you think I never sing?”

That made him pause in his tracks. “I’ve heard you once or twice,” he answered her. “With Poe and Lindy. Not that well, of course, but I could tell what you were doing.”

She shouldn’t have been surprised that he knew. She’d sung the little girls to sleep a few times, and Lindy in particular seemed to respond well to Seven lullabies. Rhus must have sung them to her too. If Haymitch had sounded incredulous, or mocking, she’d have wanted to cut him with harsh words, hit him where it hurt. “Never had the guts to do it publicly either, even when I was a kid. It was mine, me and my friends, anyway.” Usually more teasing lines from songs than genuine performance, because the thought of that vulnerability scared her. “And I sure as fuck wasn’t going to tell Plutarch about it now. Just one more thing they’d use to make me into their cheap Katniss 2.0.” Never mind that she was older, that she’d been singing long before Katniss, that the girl didn’t have a monopoly on that talent. The comparison would be drawn anyway, and it would look desperate and clumsy, and Johanna would inevitably look like the inferior copy. 

“Smart call.”

“You ever miss it?” She meant the fiddle, not all of it--childhood, friendships now long lost, innocence, laughter without fear of the darkness. She’d maybe rediscovered that feeling for a little while in his arms tonight, among all the others sharing that light-hearted communal joy, but in the end, the demons and the private ordeal of them set them apart. There were parts of her that she could never share with people from Seven, never mind the ties of homeland and culture and blood.

“Sometimes.” She’d get him a fiddle if she could, she decided right then. No pressure, no expectations, simply a gift for him to use if he chose. A part of himself that he could reclaim, if he wanted it, the same way his father had tonight with the dancing. Maybe someday he’d play for her.

They turned the corner into the row of shops, all darkened for the night, climbing the few steps up to the wooden walkway, out of the muddy street. She watched carefully for patches of ice that might have frozen again with the dropping temperatures at night. Their heavy winter boots hit the boards with several feet of open air beneath, and so their steps resounded with a hollow thump. “Well,” she reached out and playfully pushed his arm, “let’s keep that between us. Don’t tell Aurelius. He’ll be all over making you play and me sing, out in public, as some kind of therapy.” His low chuckle of amusement made her smile. “So, what’s the good doctor’s latest advice to you anyway? Me, we’re going to find better ways to deal with my ‘fear of expressing vulnerable sentiments’.” She crooked her fingers in air quotes for the last words. All right, maybe not totally fair to Roarke, but sometimes the dry, clinical words he used were easier for them to laugh about it together, break through the ice and introduce whatever step the shrink insisted was necessary for them to take next. “Maybe I’m supposed to make a big public romantic declaration or something?”

“Oh, hell, please don’t. No, now we’re dealing with ‘appropriate analysis of responsibility’ to things beyond my control. Kind of boring, given he spent most of the last two months more or less telling me to go jerk off a lot,” Haymitch said flippantly. But she could see the tension in his shoulders, even as he made the joke. “And he didn’t even put it as telling me to go fuck myself. A real missed opportunity, I’d say.”

She laughed at that, unable to help it, not laughing at him, only at the situation, and maybe some relief as well. “He put you on the plan to own your orgasms too, huh?”

“Oh, did you get that gold star already?” Now he turned to her with more ease, some of the awkwardness draining from him. She’d felt embarrassed as hell sitting there with Aurelius when it came up, him looking at her with that gentle, understanding expression even as she defensively made remarks that she hoped he wasn’t getting off on the idea of sending her home to touch herself.

But he’d been right, in the end. _How can you propose to give your body to someone in any meaningful way, when you still feel as if it’s not your own?_ She’d needed to feel all that. Not just rubbing one out either, but reacquainting herself with all of her body, her sensations, her pleasures. Even something as simple as eating chocolate without guilt meant something, and trying to take a long bath had been a pain in the ass given the need to heat wood on the stove, but it had been worth it. All of it gave her back a sense of awareness and control of her body that no cheap fuck with a Capitolite ever could have, and it left her feeling good rather than dirty. Her body was hers again, and with it came the realizations of how to make herself feel good, and the right to do it. 

It had to have been even worse for him, forced into total submission as he’d been over those long years. Locked up inside to the point where he performed on command for his Capitol masters, and tried to feel nothing, because physical pleasure during a rape was nothing short of an unbearable horror. They’d owned his body completely, to the point where his escape from it been passive and very likely unintentional, the happenstance of weight gain and drunkenness and middle age finally making them abandon him. Now she cast her mind back to some little things in him lately, the way he lingered over a cup of coffee, the greater ease at lying there together in bed, the way he’d been relaxing in the tub last week, head tipped back and eyes closed, when she walked into the bathroom to brush her teeth. The way he’d danced with her tonight, the ease of it seeming more than an automatic mask for the public. So he’d been trying to wake himself up as well. She hadn’t wanted to ask, maybe because she didn’t want to put pressure on him too early. But now--he must have mentioned it only because he felt comfortable with where it had taken him, right? “So?” she asked him, eyes meeting his. 

The sense of sheepish laughter stopped then, not awkwardly, but simply because something else seemed to have entered the air between them. They weren’t two teenagers walking home from a dance. They never could be again; it could never be so easy, the troubles so small. “It’ll always be there, you know,” she told him softly. “It’s like scar tissue.” No matter how much they worked with Roarke Aurelius, how far they came, it would be there. She could want him, could own her body enough to feel some control in it all, and still be half-dizzy with terror at the thought at the same time. And who was to say that some little thing, a sight, a sound, a turn of phrase, might not bring it all surging back at the worst possible time?

He let out his breath in an exhalation that turned into a misty puff in the night air, like a dragon smoking before breathing out flame. “I know that. And there’s a part of me that thinks I’ll always be a little bit scared shitless.”

She understood that. The fear of letting someone in that close, of opening up and letting go, of offering up that kind of trust. Trying to learn how to trust again, to believe in something better, to not dwell in the nightmares that had been their sole companions for years and years. She’d almost rather get shot again. “Me too,” she acknowledged quietly, hands balling into fists inside her ragged gloves, glancing down at an ice-rimed patch on the sidewalk, stepping aside into the alley between Ulme Brown’s and the Schneider’s tailor shop. “But courage means being afraid and doing it anyway, right?” 

She looked up at him again then, seeing him watching her with that thoughtful expression, as if trying to weigh what she thought or felt. Something about him as he stood there, the lines of high cheekbones and that level, intent grey gaze, eyes shining bright and intent in the winter starlight. A dangerous man, bright and coolly arrogant and sometimes even a little ruthless--a man any number of Capitolites had paid to admire, to touch and possess, before the implied streak of darkness in him grew wide enough to swallow him up in depression and drink, turning from something to make a lover shiver with anticipation to shuddering with disgust. He was that man, all right, sharp and hard to handle, impatient with idiots and willing to fight with all the weapons at his disposal. But she’d seen beneath that now too, to the sweetness and sadness and scars he’d kept hidden well away beneath the sarcasm and seeming nonchalance, even from her. The man who laughed out of more than amused sarcasm, who struggled to fight his demons, who’d taken on the kids he couldn’t see cast away into the cold lovelessness where they would survive but slowly wither, denied any kind of care and affection. He fought, sometimes clumsily, and sometimes he lost, but he fought all the same. 

He watched her for another moment, eyes wide and a pucker of worry or uncertainty in his brow that made him look oddly vulnerable. Then it smoothed out and he leaned in slowly, hand on her shoulder to steady her, and kissed her. So he was ready, as she’d hoped, and action worked where words failed, and sometimes it was better that way, this showed far more than any speech or explanation ever could have. The edge of fear was there, crackling through her just the same as him. This changed things, all the implied promises, the sense of the road ahead. But for now, she tried to shut that out and live only in that moment. His kiss was gentle, no sexual urgency to it, but there was the sense of something intent to it, a sort of surrender of a final barrier. She could feel it in him, the fierce longing of a man now awakening again, one who’d locked away all the tenderness and passion within him for years, with nobody to give it to, nobody to care. Not a plea to get laid, but the ache to be answered with the same depth of feeling. She kissed him back and couldn’t help answering him in kind, not thinking to hold back. She’d wanted this too damn much, to be held like this, kissed like this, in a way that held meaning, slow and deliberate. Wanted it from Haymitch specifically for months even as she feared what it would mean, wanted it even more of late now that Aurelius’ plan seemed to have awoken that hunger in her all the sharper. But yes, she’d wanted this from a man in general for all those years she’d tried to accept she’d never have it. Someone whose actions would tell her, _Yes, you mean that much to me, no matter what you’ve been and what you’ve been through. You’re worth loving._ He’d felt that same hopeless loneliness too, and from how tightly he clung to her in kind, this meant too much to him as well. And after the Capitol, it shocked her how good, how powerful, it felt to say _yes_ and mean it with all her heart, to choose and be equally chosen, and have it be something more than trying to slap a bandage on a raw wound with friendly but shallow sex. 

She didn’t know how long they clung to each other like that, or who stepped back first, but she felt the loss of it immediately. But the warmth was still there, inside her, like a glowing ember rather than the hollow sense of emptiness--or the dark sense of shame--she’d always had with any other lips she’d ever kissed, even Finnick’s. This was something real. “Worth the wait,” she said, not sure whether she was telling him her opinion or asking his. 

He squeezed her hands one more time and let go. “It’s cold and it’s late.” She didn’t get the sense of evasiveness from it, only a reluctant acknowledgement of reality. It was all right to leave it there, no need to rush and push for everything. She didn’t need to fuck him tonight, even after that. After all, he’d be there next to her, all night, in the cherrywood bed her grandparents had made. And tomorrow they’d probably have to talk about that kiss to Roarke--awkward--and see where the next step took them. Her body and soul were hers again, to give where she chose, but there were more walls than could be overcome with a single kiss. But at least she could believe they were ready to take that on, and the prickle of fear was there as it always would be, but the sense of rightness, of anticipation, outweighed it. 

“Let’s get the kids to bed,” she agreed.


	44. Chapter 44

Getting someone shirtless had never been all that high on Johanna’s agenda. She’d barely looked at Haymitch those years ago, eyes avoided in shyness and awkwardness. She never wanted to look at any of her patrons. With Finnick, when they were sleeping together so long ago, he hadn’t walked around in skimpy vests or sheer silk shirts like he had in his later years, his body more developed from gawky puppy boyishness to lean youthful manhood. She’d gotten his shirt off sometimes, but it was all in a frenzy to feel something besides used and soiled and empty. With the victors she’d slept with to get back at Finnick, with all the Capitolites she’d used and discarded as her own self-destructive vengeance, the shirts usually stayed on if she could help it, not really wanting their skin against hers enough to seek it out.

But when it did happen, it was simply one rushed step in a rapid dance. It meant nothing. Even lately those times in the bathroom or even back in the CPC with Haymitch, both of them bypassing each other in a hurry with the grooming rituals, being shirtless or even buck naked, it was just functional bare skin. They didn’t exactly look away in embarrassment, but neither did they linger over the fact.

This was different, with him lying there shirtless on his stomach on the blue wool blanket that had been a wedding gift from her parents, on the bed her grandparents made, the bed her parents slept in for years. She preferred to not dwell _too_ much on those details, but two generations of her family had their share of intimate joy in this same bed. There Haymitch was now, trying to relax with his chin pillowed on his crossed arms, but she could see the ridges of his shoulder blades tensed and drawn up against his skin ever so slightly. Finnick’s bullets hadn’t punched through him, so the only scars clear on his back were the claw-like marks from Thalius Eland’s knife. 

_Slowly_ , Roarke told them. Nothing too hasty, nothing done simply in a rush to say they could do it. Right now they were in a period of just getting comfortable with touching each other. Hands off the naughty bits entirely, and trying to not feel too clueless that they more or less had a specific laundry list of things to try, given they admitted they’d lost sense of anything between total defensiveness against touch and rushing right into meaningless sex. 

She’d found out yesterday that damn, the man gave a good footrub, and after the initial moments of feeling awkward and even a bit foolish, it had felt amazing after a long day on her feet in the infirmary. 

Today was his turn again, and she’d pushed the boundaries a bit and gone for giving him a backrub. Maybe it was the memory of helping each other with the bandages, and how it had felt to touch him then, finding that mix of careful attention and the softness of affection within her and how he’d accepted it, but she thought it could happen again here--and without the excuse of medical care. Maybe, as he dryly observed when she suggested it, but with that faint grin made it loving rather than critical, _It really ain’t like you unless you’re pushing the envelope._

She must have stood there watching him a little too long. “What, are you enjoying the view?” he inquired archly, turning his head and staring at her over the curve of his shoulder, eyebrows drawn up, but there was a hint of something in his eyes, the hyperaware vigilance like an animal behind bars. “Or are you trying to figure out the best place to stab someone in the back? Kidneys.”

“C’mon. You know I’d stab people to their face,” she reminded him, and his low chuckle rewarded her, and his features relaxed before he turned back, head resting on his arms again. That seemed like a sign he was all right to go ahead. Climbing onto the bed beside him and then carefully straddling his hips, hands braced on his back to settle herself, she got out only, “Haymitch,” wanting to ask if he was OK, and she felt as he suddenly went rigid as a board beneath her. He never made a sound, though, and he didn’t thrash, didn’t fight her off. He just endured, body trembling the entire time, breath suddenly gone ragged. She could see his fingers clutched tightly in the covers. 

She could imagine all too well what had happened to him the times he’d had to lie there face-down on a bed for a Capitolite, and felt their weight pressing him down into the mattress, and couldn’t fight, couldn’t even openly show his fear or disgust. He’d let her inside the carefully constructed shell of implacability and psychological remove that he’d built so he could function for the patrons, and without that defense of not feeling at all, all that was left to feel was the pure honesty of instinctive terror and revulsion, so long suppressed and denied. 

Hurriedly she climbed off, waited for the strung-tight tension in him to relax even a bit, for him to stop shaking. She didn’t say anything initially, didn’t lie to him and tell him it would be OK, because every fucking time she panicked at something he did, it only made it worse to have what felt like pity. She didn’t touch him, much as she instinctively reached out, hand hovering uncertainly over his shoulder, but she pulled it back. Forcing any touch on him, however well-meaning, while he was reliving that nightmare was the last thing he needed. Casting around for the right words, she finally settled for an awkwardly blunt, “You can say no.”

But that must have been the right thing. Hearing him breathe in deeply, exhaling in a shuddering sigh, he looked back at her again, and he was there, without the thousand-yard-stare he’d probably worn, or the glassy-eyed look of horror. “I know,” he answered her, voice mostly calm, but there was an edge to it still. “Carry on, huh?” Now his voice had that smooth bravado.

Yeah, she wasn’t going to stumble into this and freak him out more, given she’d set him off once. “So tell me what not to do. Do I not sit on you, do I not touch you somewhere--”

He had a look of momentary bewilderment, and his brows drew down as his lips curved in a frown of thoughtfulness. “It’s tougher work for you to do it sitting beside me, so I’m fine with you sitting there. I’m...ready for it now. Expecting it. But don’t grab my ass, even as a joke. And talk. About whatever, I don’t care. Actually, no, something that makes me think is good. It’s a distraction until I get used to you there, and hearing your voice when I can’t see you, that’ll help?” He chewed his upper lip, then he looked away, looked chagrined. “Fucking hell,” he muttered, and she could hear the sharp edge of irritation in his words.

She felt for him, all too familiar with that sense of embarrassed failure. “So what, you want to talk favorite colors?” she quipped, carefully climbing on again, making sure to keep some of her weight off him by kneeling. She put her hands on his back again, not leaning into it yet, but feeling the difference in him, wary and guarded, but not overwhelmed.

“Black,” he said wryly. “It goes with everything. Doesn’t show dirt too easily.”

He was having her on, but that was good, if he could joke he wasn’t scared shitless. “Funny.” Putting some of the lotion in her hand, she rubbed her palms together to spread it out and also warm it out. Hands down on his back again, she turned to what she figured would be the best topic to get that agile mind of his distracted. “So, the latest intel from the Capitol.”

“It’s a shambles, obviously.” He gave a gruff grumble. “A whole fall and winter without their major food suppliers? They’re starting to starve.” She’d read the information as well, a sick feeling churning in her stomach. They’d long ago turned to rationing, but with the steadily dropping numbers, a Capitolite now ate even less than someone from the poor districts had before the war. “I know they’re pushing Three hard for producing synthetic meal supplements, or whatever shit, and they’ve put up greenhouses all over Five and Three, but that’s slow forthcoming.”

She started to try to rub the tension out of his muscles, carefully at first, applying more pressure as she felt him start to relax into her touch, accepting it. “You’re as knotted up as a piece of junk pine,” she told him wryly, pressing harder into the particularly tense muscles of his shoulders, trying to work them loose. Turning back to the conversation, she told him, “There’s some as would say that Capitolites starving is them getting a taste of their own medicine. Poetic justice or whatever.”

“And if the Capitolites are starving, of course One, Two, Three, Five, and Six are feeling the pinch even more. They would have cut supplies there first, before rationing their own.”

“And Twelve.” She said what he wouldn’t, or couldn’t. “They’ll be starving in Twelve too.”

“More than usual, anyway,” he answered with black humor, but the words were husky with emotion. “Someone like Fog, or even Cray, would have let people out into the woods to forage and looked the other way as best he could. Thread sure as hell won’t.”

He had the better read on Twelve’s new Head than she did, but she could imagine the suppressed agony behind the sparse words. For better or worse, they were still his people, his district, and she’d felt the pain for Seven enough to readily project what he must feel. “We could…”

“Coin won’t commit to freeing Twelve in a hurry. It’s not strategic.” He shook his head sharply. “Back to the Capitol. So what’s your opinion? Poetic justice?”

Obviously it was a painful road he didn’t want to go down right now, and it was better not to push it in that moment. “You asking the Phoenix or Johanna Mason?” she asked him, careful of the subtle difference between the two.

A soft chuckle answered her. “The Phoenix first, by all means.”

“The Phoenix would like to proclaim that we generally need to be better than those that oppressed us, and that starving out the Capitol-held districts is us basically deliberately killing the people we’re supposed to be setting free.”

“And Johanna?” She eased herself down a bit more, settling more of her weight on his hips and on her hands, waiting to see if he tensed up more again. He didn’t, and she kept rubbing, hard enough now to lean into some of the knots in earnest and actually make progress.

“Johanna says that there are innocent kids in the Capitol starving right now and if we deliberately aim to kill them too for what their parents and grandparents did, we’re no better than the fucking assholes who sat down seventy-six years ago and decided that enforced near-starvation and the Hunger Games were such a great idea.” She thought of Posy and Lindy and Vick, and imagined them starving, desperate, afraid. She’d want to kill anyone who hurt them like that, but at the same time, she’d do anything they asked to make it stop, to make them safe again.

“Good answer.” 

“Not that I’ll get to do anything with it. Coin won’t do shit about it. It’s not exactly great practice in war to supply the enemy you’re trying to force to give in.” 

He shrugged, his shoulders rippling underneath her hands. “Lousy math. Either you throw their civilians down the mineshaft or accept more of your own, and other civilians, will die in prolonged fighting. War’s a miserable business, but of course, Plutarch won’t want us to admit that to anyone.”

“Then let’s hope we win it fast come spring, or else that Snow gives up.” She laughed at herself even as she said it. “As if he ever did anything selfless in his life.” 

“He’d spout the opinion that if he gives in to the mob, he’s surrendering the nation to chaos and anarchy. Or if he’s fully aware of Coin’s nature, to another tyrant. And he’d genuinely believe it. He won’t ever step down to save lives.” 

She shook her head grimly. “Maybe we need to consider someone taking him out, and hope that other people in the Capitol are willing to surrender with him gone. One bad man dead to save thousands of lives seems like a good trade to me.”

He was silent for a few long moments, though she didn’t think he was appalled so much as thoroughly turning the idea over from every angle. He wasn’t naive enough to throw out some kind of sense of moral outrage at the idea of a targeted assassination. “Maybe. It’s worth sussing the idea out at this point. I think the Capitol’s morale is pretty worn down, and the gloss is off Snow with us spilling his dirty little secrets. They won’t dig their heels in and fight if he dies the way they would have this last summer.” 

Feeling the tension of that in the air, she turned the topic to the infirmary, the cases they had on hand at that moment. It took a while for him to unwind, and it wasn’t just due to the physical tension. But feeling him gradually ease under her hands, the rigid wariness slowly yielding to a supple relaxation bit by bit, felt good. She could give him that. He could trust her this much. Her turn for this tomorrow—she let herself imagine lying here on the bed with those strong, clever hands working on her back. It wouldn’t be easy for her either. But she could imagine it with anticipation now as well as the low current of anxiety. That was progress.

His answers gradually grew slower, shorter, less tense with the need to talk and take himself out of the reality of the moment. Finally after the lasting silence of a few minutes, he let out a soft little whistle that sounded almost like a thready half-snore and she leaned over his shoulder carefully, incredulous. She saw his cheek pillowed on his crossed arms, his eyes closed. She’d heard his breathing go deep and even, felt the difference in his body, but she hadn’t recognized he’d actually fallen asleep. Glancing at the clock, she startled slightly—she’d been at it for over an hour. It hadn’t seemed nearly that long, focused on him as she’d been.

She looked at him for a minute, shaking her head and smirking in spite of herself. “So, I’m that good, huh?” she said finally, leaning down and kissing him lightly on one shoulder before she climbed off him. He never stirred, even at that, though he was normally a sleeper so light that anything readily woke him. Small wonder—he’d been pushing himself to exhaustion again.

Good enough to make him lay aside his fears, anyway, and she settled down beside him, tired enough to want to grab a quick nap herself in the short space before dinner. So maybe they had a long way to go yet. She had a momentary image of him naked in this same bed, tangled up in the sheets, pleasantly dozing because she’d worn him out in the best way possible. But she let that go and turned back to the present, because the vulnerability of him asleep stretched out like that, trusting her to watch over him and keep him safe, and the peaceful look on his face, was a memory she’d treasure.

Arriving at the infirmary at eight as usual with Haymitch, ready to relieve the night shift, she found Roarke in the parlor, turned into the medic’s lounge, slugging down black coffee like it was going out of style. For a Thirteen man, he’d taken to coffee with a vengeance, and very pleasantly agreed to not tell Coin about the supply of it coming in steadily from Eleven. Seeing his raw, fatigue-shadowed and bloodshot eyes, she said, “Rough night?”

Aurelius was the man on call throughout the night, as the only fully trained doctor they had. Plus, as he admitted, as a widower with no kids of his own, better to disrupt him in the middle of the night than any of the other staff. “Labor, breech presentation, and she’s narrow-hipped, the foot seems to be catching in the pelvic girdle,” he said, voice flat with exhaustion. “I’m coffeeing up to try to turn the baby manually, but…” He shook his head. “She’s only fifteen,” he said, sounding amazed, even lost. Probably he was, given it wouldn’t happen in Thirteen.

Dagmar Rohnbach walked in just then too, dark eyes snapping despite the weary roll to her shoulders. “Laurel’s fully dilated but no progress,” she reported, a waspish hint of anger in her tone. Dagmar helped deliver all three Mason children back in the day, so Johanna heard in the lecture along with the spanking she got from her mom when she and Bud tried to play a prank on Dagmar back when they were little kids. Even then she seemed old and formidable and sharp-tongued, though she’d probably been barely forty then, her hair still barely frosted with grey whereas now it was more brindle with a few remaining flecks of dark brown. “We have to do _something_.”

Now as Johanna listened closer, Laurel’s muted hisses and whimpers actually came through the door. Higher pitched, childish--fifteen. Johanna saw Haymitch glancing back that way, a look of miserable helplessness on his face, and felt the hot flicker of alarm running through her too. Was it just empathy for the pain and the inability to do much of anything for it, or if they lost either Laurel or the baby, would he hurry to blame himself? Another dead teenager--this was what she’d wanted to avoid for him.

The look faded and she saw him gather his wits and resolve together, turning to Roarke. “So we’re here, what have we got that we can do?”

Now it was Roarke Aurelius’ face that took on that glum, dark expression. “We’ll try turning the baby first, like I said. But if it comes to intervening with a Caesarean, our surgical supplies are so limited now given all the cases we’ve treated from those that were out in the woods all those months. We’re so low on anesthetic, and--people out in the districts don’t even _know_ their blood type...” He probably didn’t intend it, but his incredulity actually sounded vaguely like condescension. Of course in Thirteen, blood type that would be right there in the system for any physician to pull up, along with stored blood from the obligatory blood donations. She could see him struggling with his native Thirteen impulse that ensuring a healthy live birth was the highest medical priority, the sense of failure that when the moment came, he might have his hands tied by lack of resources. 

Dagmar gave Roarke a slight scowl, as if he’d insulted her capability as one of Seven’s apothecaries, and Johanna knew damn well that the Monks, her kin, prided themselves fiercely on their medical legacy through the generations, a much pricklier pride than her niece Serratina Wilde. “We didn’t have much call to know blood type, buddy, given that almost everything we could ever get in the way of medicine was only herblore, time, and hope. Wasn’t like the Capitol gave us any resources to test blood type, let alone supplies for transfusion!”

“Wasn’t like Snow ever much cared if one more poor bastard from the outer districts lived or died,” Haymitch said sarcastically. He glanced over at Johanna with a wry, sardonic smile, and she could almost read his mind and see him thinking of the Games, the funerals throughout their childhoods, the disasters and shattered families. “One more dead kid? Nothing to fuss about at all.”

“Well,” Roarke said, something stiff and broken entering his tone, “I’m certainly not Coriolanus Snow. So.” He put down his mug. “Let’s get to it, then.”

She kept right behind Haymitch as they headed into the treatment room, hand on his back for a moment to help steady him. But it was her whose knees buckled a little, at the sight of the girl on the table, dressed in one of the faded checked flannel robes they used for patients. Fifteen, all right, a gawky child. A hungry one too, all too-thin arms and hips and legs and cheekbones, in a way that made the swell of her belly all the more pronounced, all the more grotesquely out of place, as the only abundance and roundness on her body. Pain-filled peat-brown eyes turned to Johanna, and she saw in them the open terror, the pain. It churned sickeningly within her. This girl had stood in the square for a few summers now on Reaping Day, watched Johanna and Blight take two doomed kids away. If not for the Quell being turned by Plutarch’s manipulations into a reaping of victors, it could have been Laurel Johanna brought to the Capitol last July, looking at her with that same pleading look. So many of them had, though the ones that were almost worse were the ones who looked dull and resigned, whether they figured it was useless or that Johanna wouldn’t even try. 

Haymitch’s hand on her arm helped steady her. “Talk to her,” he muttered to Johanna, and he wasn’t sure whether it was a suggestion to her or a mutual plan of action, but it would have to do. Heading up towards the head of the table, she left Dagmar and Roarke down at the foot to take care of their business there, and Haymitch helping with their instruments and the like, glancing up at Johanna occasionally.

How the hell to even start this? _So hey, kiddo, you’re fifteen and knocked up, were you just careless with your boyfriend last June or what?_ She reached out and took Laurel’s hand in hers, feeling the surprising strength in the girl’s answering grip. “Cuss all you want,” she said, because hell, that seemed to be the best idea. And most women giving birth that she’d seen seemed to end up there eventually. She couldn’t help but ask. “They not been feeding you or what?”

Laurel laughed, a sound that wavered and turned into a hiss of pain. “I’m a community home brat, Johanna. Have been since I was three. Headed out into the woods right after the Quell--” Another grunt of pain, fingers tensing in Johanna’s, and a murmured apology from Roarke. “But I couldn’t make it out there. Not knocked up and with winter coming. So I came back in October. Pretty stupid.” 

“You figured you couldn’t survive and came back where you could. That’s smart.” Maybe it worked for some to die out there in freedom, and she couldn’t fault them for that, but she also couldn’t fault a scared pregnant teenager with nobody to turn to for coming back and taking her chances here in Seven.

Her eyes narrowed, still wary and suspicious, even as her brow creased and jaw clenched again in pain. “Bet you’re wondering who I messed around and how I was stupid enough to let this happen, huh?”

She gave a wry snort in reply. ”So maybe it’s the whole ‘Johanna’s a huge slut’ reputation I got--thanks, Capitol media--but I’m not really that much into judging peoples’ sex lives.” She had the sense Laurel wanted to talk about it, but she needed the excuse of someone prodding her somehow, so it wouldn’t seem like a desperate need to be heard. “But if someone hurt you…”

“You got whored out,” Laurel said insistently, eyes wide and pleading, “maybe you get it…the community home, there was never enough to eat. Every winter kids starved, or they were so skinny they couldn’t fend off the pneumonia or flu...” Growing up, they’d all known kids died in the community home at a higher rate than others, but nobody ever really did much about it. They were all far too busy desperately scraping by in their own right to have the luxury of looking out for those made even more vulnerable by lack of family. Maybe not as bad as in Twelve, but there were always those who sold their bodies to get by, because it was the only currency they had. She’d never really connected the two that intimately, but the link was there now, indelible and horrible.

She heard Haymitch’s slow, resigned sigh at that, and as if it were printed in neon letters, he must have been thinking of his own mother. “You don’t need to apologize for it,” he said gruffly. “There’s no shame in that. Not yours, anyway, if there’s any.” She saw the glint in Laurel’s eye, and how the girl rapidly blinked back the tears at that. 

“Peacekeeper?” she asked Laurel softly, thinking that if it had been, that made living in a place where some of the Peacekeepers were now their allies all the more difficult. “Did--” _Did he force you?_ Did it matter in the end whether he’d raped her violently or simply used her? Some sort of shame would be there either way, the sense of being worthless and dirty. And even now, getting justice for an actual rape was unlikely.

“Don’t know,” she said miserably, looking away, a stain of red creeping into her ashen cheeks. “There were three Peacekeepers, and a carpenter’s apprentice--”

She sighed to herself, reaching out and clumsily patting Laurel on the shoulder. “Doesn’t matter right now,” she said softly. “What matters that we get you through this OK.” She debated mentioning the baby as well, but decided that given she wasn’t really sure whether Laurel wanted the kid, it might be a cruelty instead of a kindness.

Roarke’s skilled hands finally worked some magic. The baby was perfect, a little boy with tiny fingers and toes and a downy fuzz of dark hair. Pure Seven by the look of him, no matter who his father had been. But the cord wrapped around his neck, and the blue cast to his skin, told her that he’d never open that mouth to yowl or laugh, never open those eyes.

“It’s better off this way,” Laurel said, voice trembling, eyes closed and refusing to see her son, “he’s not just one more lost kid.” Half-turned over onto her side, hiding her face from them, she looked on the verge of breaking down. Whether she’d wanted the child or not, in that moment, she grieved, and it was too much to handle.

Dagmar took the tiny blanket-wrapped bundle, looking at Laurel with a swell of softness and sympathy in those flint-sharp eyes that made her suddenly beautiful. Haymitch grabbed Roarke’s arm, jerking his chin towards the door, and then glancing at Johanna questioningly. She nodded back at him. She’d stay here a while, given they had no urgent cases. 

Maybe she hadn’t ever gone through the agony of giving birth as Laurel just had, but she was a mother now, and she couldn’t leave this poor kid to cry alone, thrown headlong all bewildered and painful into a too-big, too-adult world. She’d felt that after killing Clark, though after all the tears she’d already shed on camera, she’d held those back until after the Games were over and the camera was off, but she’d bawled in the Seven apartment that first night back, never mind that Cedrus and Blight probably heard. They’d left her to it and that was the best thing they could have done. She’d cried again in that same bed the night after she slept with Haymitch, feeling like she’d whored herself out by giving her body to a virtual stranger out of pure desperation, no different than any poor trash pine girl selling herself back home might have done. Not nearly so hard as she’d cried after the next night with Gaius Luna, humiliated and overwhelmed. But she’d never tell Haymitch about those tears, because he didn’t need to know. He hadn’t bought her. He’d been as much a victim as her in that, and it could only hurt him, make him feel guilt that he shouldn’t. She’d already used it as a weapon against him for too long, unable to turn the anger and blame on Snow where it belonged.

“It won’t be easy,” she said, putting a hand on Laurel’s too-thin shoulder, feeling the ridge of bone there, wanting to get the poor kid a sandwich, give her a hug, do anything that might help, but not sure what it was. “It won’t. But you’re strong. You’ve survived all this already.” She inhaled, not knowing exactly what form this promise would take, but compelled to make it anyway. She’d rotted away, isolated and depressed and humiliated and angry--she couldn’t save any of her tributes, but she could intervene to make sure this girl wouldn’t go down the drain. _Dammit, Haymitch. Spend a few months with the man, and now you’re just like him, wanting to save every stray and fucking sob story that crosses your path._ Though even as she quipped it in her mind, the glibness of it an instinctive defense, she couldn’t really believe it. He’d helped bring out the best in her, the parts she’d thought long lost. Laurel was young still, for all her rough childhood. Given a chance, she might still make a good go of it in life. “And you won’t be alone.” 

The sedatives must have taken hold, because Laurel gave a thick-tongued, “Thanks,” and there was no answer after that. Brushing Laurel’s sweat-sticky brown hair back from her eyes, Johanna saw she was asleep. Best to leave her to it, and what peace from physical and mental pain that it could bring.

She found Haymitch on rounds, taking care of changing bandages, and silently pitched in to help him. Once they finished that, descending the stairs from the ward back down towards the lounge, she pushed the door open and headed for the coffeepot. Pouring them each a mug, she shoved it across the battered table to him. No sugar, and no milk right now--they were at the end of a ration cycle. It didn’t matter. The heat and the caffeine of the coffee were what mattered most, and he always took his black anyway.

“Can we take on one more kid?” She wasted no time getting down to it. No point carefully carving knife-strokes around the matter, time to dig right into the heart of it.

The fact he didn’t look surprised told her that he must have been thinking of it too. “Logistically? Of course. She’ll get her rations, same as anyone else--might even be better managed as part of a family unit rather than a communal issue. Need to pester Coin for better community home rations, though…better management, maybe.” 

“You can’t do everything,” she reminded him, putting some heat into her words. “Not to mention sticking your fingers in too many pies here--”

He looked chagrined, even hurt, his jaw clenching for a moment. “Still the outsider, huh?”

“No,” she insisted, determined that he not misunderstand and sink back into that darkness of self-loathing and feeling worthless, “it’s that if you storm in and tell the administration of the community home they’re doing a shitty job--and we don’t know how they’re doing now with Thirteen’s rations, it was during the Capitol’s tenure that she got driven to sell herself--they will likely very kindly invite you to go fuck yourself. You’re Twelve-born, you grew up hard but you’ve lived a materially easy life for twenty-five years, and while you’re raising some orphans yourself, you never had to deal with anything on their scale. With that plus how you’re already involved in the infirmary and all, it’ll look like you’re criticizing how Seven does things. Look into it, by all means. But let’s delegate it. You need to learn how to do that anyway.”

“I flew solo too long, didn’t have anyone I could rely on for anything,” he said, by way of apology or explanation. “But all right, all right, I hear you. Anyway--logistically, we have the space, without question.” His eyes met hers, steady and sharp. “But we can’t take in every orphan out there.”

“No, we can’t. But a lot of them are just scared and sad and alone. Ordinary people can help them deal with that. Those kids, they don’t have those...those kind of scars that we can deal with best.”

“Yeah, OK. She’s one that needs something more specialized in the way of a family.” Chin in his hand, elbow braced on the table, he gave a rueful sounding laugh. “Ah, what the hell. Guess we’re the optimal parents for the orphans-by-execution, teen whores, and teen killers of the world.”

“I don’t imagine the other kids will fuss about it.” Madge might be glad to have someone roughly her own age around, and knowing Peeta, he’d probably step up to help protect Laurel in a way she’d never had. 

“It’s only fair, anyway,” he said, and she could see the ease of good humor returning, “given we’ve got four Twelve kids and one Seven at this point.”

“Oh, good, I’ll have to go try to find two boys…” He jokingly chucked a crumpled piece of paper at her and she dodged it. “She’ll need people in the days to come anyway. While she figures out how she feels about all of it.”

He nodded, taking a long swig of his coffee and keeping the mug in his hands, fingers wrapped around it. “Hard to know how to feel about the baby, I’d say.”

If things were different, if the shots hadn’t been so reliable, she could have had kids too, fathered by some indifferent Capitolite. Haymitch could have had literally dozens of kids running around. “We’ll talk to our folks at dinner, the kids too. They have a say in it too.” The final decision was hers and Haymitch’s, true, but they deserved to have an opinion, given they’d all be involved if Laurel came home with them. She mustered a smile for him, feeling the ache in her back and shoulders from holding still for hours, clutching Laurel’s hand. “Think I might really need to try out that backrub tonight.” Dealing with her unease there wouldn’t be easy, but she needed something from him tonight, needed that sense of closeness and trust to help shut out what had turned into a rough day. She had to find a way to forget Laurel’s misery and that perfect, dead baby for a little while so that she could start to break it down and deal with it. Especially the baby--thoughts there intruded that she wasn’t ready for yet. 

He gave her one of those open, genuine smiles, eyes soft with understanding. “Knotted up like junk pine, huh?”

She rolled her shoulders, suppressing a wince. “Oh yeah.”

The evening didn’t go too easily. Though surprisingly, the family dinner was the less fraught part of the two. They rambled out an explanation about _fifteen_ and _orphaned since she was little_ and after Lindy and Posy wandered off to play, they added _prostitution_ and _just lost the baby_. Surprisingly, the first question came from Petra. “What’s her name?”

“Laurel,” Haymitch answered quietly, and she saw him carefully scanning everyone’s faces to try and see what they thought. “Laurel Hamilton.” 

She looked at her mother’s face, the softness and sympathy there in her eyes, and although she’d thought of Magnolia first, she’d made the connection there too. Fifteen, pregnant by sex that had been anything but wanted--yeah, Petra understood that. 

Peeta carefully scraped up the last of the stew from his bowl. “We all need someone. And it makes a big difference, when you belong. Far be it from me to deny her that, when I’ve been lucky enough to get it.”

“Fifteen,” Phineas muttered, obviously disgusted, shaking his head slowly, the lines of age in his face carved even deeper by his fierce frown.

Gunnar spoke up, as sharp as she’d ever heard him, “Maybe it’s because you never had daughters yourself, Phin, but you don’t judge that girl--”

“I’m pissed at _them_ , dammit, not her,” Phineas shot back, brown eyes snapping with the same anger, “she was underage--” 

“She probably lied. Said she was sixteen.” Magnolia glanced down at her plate. Her next words were barely more than a murmur, and had Johanna not been sitting on her other side, she might not have heard them. “I did, at first.” Phineas winced. Not guilt, since as she understood it, the two of them hadn't gotten involved until Magnolia was past twenty, but obviously it struck a nerve with him about her situation then and about Peacekeeper conduct.

She saw Vick’s anxious glance, picking up on the current of unsaid things and the tension of the past. Funny thing how the kids seemed to accept the prospect of a new sister as a matter of course--probably how they’d been brought together in a family already made them more open to it. It was their parents, with the old ghosts that simultaneously gave them perfect sympathy while provoking some phantom pain, that might be tougher. But after those few moments, it seemed to ease. “She needs someone,” Magnolia said, “and it seems we’re best suited.” She smiled, and it didn’t look fake or forced. “I’ll go see her tomorrow, maybe?” 

“Gonna have to go get more furniture,” Haymitch observed. “Another chair, for one,” he nodded to the table. 

“Gee, good thing we’re in the district where it’s made.” Not like it would be in Twelve, where they’d have to order it and get it shipped by train. They could go down the hill to the workshops and get it right there. 

Haymitch grinned over at her. “So now it’ll be twelve people for dinner--our little family’s so very Panem-appropriate.”

“Maybe Plutarch can spin a propo about that nice bit of symbolism. So which of us gets to represent those Three weirdos?” With that joke, the mood seemed to lighten. Vick went to go get the two kiddles and Peeta hustled to bring on dessert--he’d made biscuits and transformed sickly sweet canned peaches by grilling them in a skillet. 

As for the backrub, didn’t go easily at first, the sense of him looming over her, bigger and stronger, setting her nerves abuzz, but eventually she relaxed, and it was easy from that to slip on her pajamas and roll rapidly into sleep. She woke on hearing the creak of the door, heart pounding, eyes wide and alert, and she heard Haymitch startle next to her as well, his gasping intake of breath. But at least he didn’t reach for a knife and she didn’t try to jump out of bed, ready to fight or run. Peering towards the door, the silver bars of winter moonlight coming through the gap in the curtains outlined the two small figures there. “Ah,” she heard Haymitch’s relieved grumble of recognition, and he moved away from her, creating a pocket between them.

Posy and Lindy wasted no time, anxiety and cold both probably acting as a spur as they scrambled up into the bed and under the covers. Posy settled back against Johanna, back nestled against her. It was like this at least once a week still, sometimes more--she vaguely remembered being so small and crawling into bed with her mom and dad, and these two little girls had more to fear than imaginary monsters. “Bad dreams again, kiddo?” she asked Posy, putting an arm around her, feeling the lingering tension. She glanced over towards Haymitch and saw that Lindy likewise cuddled up to him, hearing the faint sniffles from where she’d burrowed up against him, face buried in the shirt of his pajamas.

“I dreamed good. But Lindy’s crying again,” Posy answered, the worry for the girl who’d become her little sister obvious in her voice. It had been like that with her and Heike, that fierce protective anxiety, the recognition of how much more vulnerability and helplessness could be contained in just a few years difference in age.

She heard Haymitch murmuring something lowly to Lindy, so she turned her attention to Posy. “Thanks for bringing her here.” Though something about Posy’s demeanor told her that there was something on her mind too.

Posy wasted no time bursting out with it. “If we’re gonna get another sister, is she gonna take care of Lindy ‘stead of me?” The note of anxiety was there, the sense of being shoved out of her place.

“Well, hey, it didn’t happen with Madge, now did it?” They’d been through this once already, and figured out that Posy’s angry attitude towards Madge related to being afraid that this older girl would bump her out of her role as guardian of her new little sister. Roarke’s opinion was that it had made her feel better, more in control, to have had someone of her own to look after during her captivity, even as she clung so hard to Vick’s protection. It was easy enough to figure out a six-year-old. Teenagers, though--that was another story.

Posy hesitated before answering. “No, but Madge ain’t from Seven.”

“Laurel’s older. Fifteen. That’s...” Shit, where were six-year-olds in terms of math?

“I know fifteen, I can count way up over two hundred. Grandpa Phin won’t tell me how many he is but he says he’s ‘old as dirt’.” She heard a rueful chuckle from Haymitch at that. “How old’s dirt? Bigger than two hundred?”

“Grandpa Phin’s exaggerating.” She reached out in the dark, ran her fingers over that silky-fine black hair. “And Lindy’s still gonna need you, trust me.” She debated telling Posy about Heike then, but held back. Too much to explain still, and Heike’s absence might bring a new fear into Posy’s life that she’d somehow lose Lindy.

“Miz Jo Hanna?” As ever, she made Johanna’s name into two words.

“Yeah?”

“I miss my mama.”

“I know, kiddo.” She could relate to that feeling all too well, but unlike her, Posy wouldn’t ever see Hazelle Hawthorne again. She reached out and hugged Posy tightly.

“Are you my ma now, for real?” She said it hesitantly, as if reluctant to betray the memory of the mother who’d been her whole world, but Johanna could hear the need to know in her voice. _We all need somewhere to belong,_ Peeta said. More astute than he knew, that one.

She could hear the quiet over on Haymitch’s side, Lindy calm now, and of course he was listening too. “You could...call me ‘Mom’ instead,” she suggested carefully, after thinking about it. “That way, she’ll always be ‘Ma’.”

“That makes Mister Haymitch ‘Dad’, ‘cause my pa, he went up to the sky?” That must have been how Hazelle explained it.

It was Haymitch who answered that, and she heard the slight rough edge in his voice, his own grief for Posy’s father and mother, childhood friends and bright childhood days long since gone. “Yeah. And your ma, she’s there with him. And Rory and Gale too.”

Posy said solemnly, “I’ll tell Lindy and Vick and Madge and Peeta and our new sister Laurel that I say you’re our mom and dad now.”

She bit back a laugh, not wanting to offend that fragile childhood dignity, and oddly touched, but said, “That’s good, Poe, but we’ll let them each decide what they want to call us, OK?” One thing for someone as young as Posy or Lindy to call Haymitch ‘Dad’, but it would be another thing entirely for someone like Vick or Peeta.

“OK.” Posy settled back down against the pillow, obviously intending to stay the night. Her foot thumped Johanna’s knee. “Night night up in the sky, Ma and Pa and Rory and Gale. Night night, Lindy.”

“Night night, Poey,” Lindy chirped back.

“You need to say night night to your ma and pa in the sky, Lindy.”

“Night night, Poey?” Lindy sounded confused, not knowing exactly what was being asked.

“She’s a bit young for that yet, Poe.” 

“All right. Night night, Grandmas Nola and Petra and Grandpas Gunnar and Phin and Peeta and Vick and our new sister Laurel too.”

 _Night night, Laurel,_ she said silently, thinking of the girl in the infirmary, ready to go see her again tomorrow. _Night night, Bern and Heike. Be safe. Love you._

Instead of the usual _Mister Haymitch and Miz Jo Hanna_ , Posy finished tonight with “Night night, Mom. Night night, Dad.”

She let Haymitch answer that one, because as much as it filled her mind and heart, almost too much to bear, it was likely even more meaningful for him. Kids he’d known and watched grow up, children of two people he’d once loved, and Posy had always eyed him carefully even as she gravitated to Johanna, obviously not sure what to do with a strange adult male as a father figure like she’d never had in her life. That acceptance and love had to mean all that much more to him. His voice was soft as he answered, “Night night, Posy.”


	45. Chapter 45

March came in with a roar, as was apparently the usual with Seven, so Johanna told him. Granted, the new snow wasn’t much, the merest dusting, much like Peeta delicately tapping powdered sugar onto the top of one of his fancy pastries. Madge apparently had a talent for baking too but then, she’d probably learned it from her grandfolks on the Donner side before they died. If not for the sugar rationing continuing, they’d all be getting fat. As was, he’d put back on a few pounds since Thirteen--they all had--but Johanna made light of it, “Hell, we all need some insulation, the winters are shitty here, and those Thirteen pricks never set foot outside to know what it’s like.”

Extra insulation or not, it wasn’t enough to block the raw wind whipping its way through the Glade, rattling its way through the still-bare branches with an eerie sound. Ducking his head, tucking his chin down into his coat collar, he took the steps onto Blight and Clover’s porch two at a time. He remembered now why he snugged up in his house for much of the winter. Nothing much worth going out for in days like this, and it wasn’t like he’d had anything to compel him out of the house, short of running out of liquor.

Knocking on the door, pressing close to get out of the wind, Clover answered, looking him over. “You look like you got flung through the Glade sideways,” she said, clicking her tongue, but smiling.

“Gee, thanks, Chloe,” he told her, pushing his hair back from where it had blown into a wind-tumbled mess.

“Could be worse,” she said with a slight shrug, closing the door behind him with some effort. “At least the trees here provide _some_ windbreak. The real howlers and bad storms are out on the plains.”

Given he’d experienced some of the wind and duststorms back in Nine and Ten, he could imagine, but that was in summer. Winter there must be its own particular kind of hell. “Mountains did in Twelve too, I’d reckon.” He nodded towards the interior of the house. The heat wasn’t on, of course, with no electricity, but some remnant of the parlor fire seeped out even here, and simply being out of the wind helped. “Kids ready?” He could hear the sounds of them playing upstairs, the happy shouts. Good for them to have time with the friends they’d made in Thirteen, those whose parents had come here with them--though that was most of them, since most of the victors didn’t have a taste for Thirteen’s rules either. As was, he and Johanna figured it was good for Lindy and Posy in particular to get together with the group, and all of them forget the time they’d spent in the Capitol’s hands. Posy barely could contain her excitement at playgroup today, burbling eagerly about how she’d tell them all about her new sister Laurel, and how she’d see her best friend Trina again.

“Not yet, but I’ll go get ‘em.” Clover headed upstairs, calling as she went, “Blight’s busy cleaning up some paint mess. Coffee’s in the kitchen, help yourself.” Heading that way, he poured a mug of it, taking a sip. It must have been fresh, lacking the too-strong, bitter metallic taste of stuff left warming for hours. Not like that would stop him from drinking it. He’d certainly poured far worse down his throat for years.

Hearing the knock on the door, recalling Blight was busy and figuring that Clover had her hands full cutting Posy and Lindy out of the gaggle and getting their coats and boots on, he headed for the door, setting his coffee mug down on the counter, throwing a slip of scrap paper under it to keep it from marking the white marble.

Opening the door carefully against the wind, he saw Chaff standing there, coat carelessly half-buttoned, unshaven and bleary-eyed. The scent of his breath told him that not only had his old friend been drinking his breakfast, he’d probably gone right through lunch and several snacks as well. Given what he knew of Chaff’s tolerance, the man had to have pounded it hard. Swaying on his feet too lightly, as if the porch rocked beneath his feet--the sick feeling curdled in his stomach to see it. Like looking at a mirror of what he must have been, too ashamed still to watch any of the Games coverage of the last few years and see himself like that. “How much have you had?”

Chaff’s eyes narrowed, oil-dark and angry, delicate bloodshot tracery running through them. “As if you’re the man to judge.”

No, he wasn’t, but for fuck’s sake, the man was here to pick up his daughter and he could barely stand up straight. And this wasn’t Chaff. Chaff--Chaff was the happy drunk who could turn it all around for Haymitch, make him laugh with more than cynicism. With Chaff, the alcohol seemed like a lark, an adventure, two long-time friends throwing back a few and telling stupid stories. It was only back at home, all alone, that it turned into the solemn ritual of trying to blot everything out as efficiently as possible. Chaff shouldn’t look like this, like he might crack at any moment. Mostly, his sole surviving daughter shouldn’t see him like this, but it made him wonder if she had before--what had Chaff been like at home all those years, let alone these last months since losing Zee and Rabe and Chardy? They’d been friends and drinking buddies from Haymitch’s first mentoring year, but he become Haymitch’s best drinking pal back in 53 after Tansy died and they both went down the drain further that year, and he _knew_ the man couldn’t handle his sorrows without drowning them. 

But the dark old ghost of Blair Abernathy stood there beside him, the few flickers of fear a two-year-old boy felt at an angry voice in the night, too young to truly understand but old enough for it to leave an impression. Farrow was nine now, wasn’t she--more than old enough to see and understand and feel that fear, and she’d had enough to be afraid of already. The thought of Posy or Lindy scared like that made him speak up, however reluctant he was. “I ain’t judging you, but…what about Farrow?” 

That smile on Chaff’s face was one he’d only ever seen turned towards a few of the Careers Chaff didn’t bother to pretend he hated. He exhaled another cloud of fumes into Haymitch’s face. “Always the smart boy, ain’t you? Foster daddy for a few months and you know it all about being a parent, huh?”

It hit its intended mark, and he couldn’t say much to it. Not without being the overbearing know-it-all asshole telling everyone what to do with much less experience at it than them. Plus, yes, he’d lost the high ground to tell Chaff off on drinking, and they both knew it. But he couldn’t walk away, all the same, but this was a fight where he was powerless again. Not if he wanted to keep the friendship alive, but was it worth more to keep his friend, or see Farrow get her father back? “Chaff…”

“You don’t get to tell me what’s what,” Chaff insisted, obviously sensing blood and pressing the attack. “You were a fucking mess for years, Haymitch, and we didn’t try to tell you otherwise. So no, you don’t get to tell _any_ of us how it goes now that you’re all high on sobriety just because you’ve got it good--you’ve got your folks back, you’ve got a wife, you’ve got kids.” A bitter, tired smile crossed his lips. “You lose any of that, boy, you’re right back on the bottle. We both know it.”

There was the part of him that wanted to fight back against Chaff’s angry mockery, to say that it was a struggle, every damn day, no matter how good life was right now. He still wanted that fucking bottle all the same sometimes, so strong an urge that it was nearly a physical pain. And he had the people he loved, yes, and they made it all bearable and often even sweet. But he still woke up terrified, he still had to be so damn careful in the slow steps with Johanna in terms of sex, he still sometimes had to retreat somewhere to be alone for a while when it all got to be too much. He had good things now, but he’d still been a killer and a whore and a loner, lived with the loss and the shame and the booze for twenty-five years. It didn’t just erase because his luck had turned, any more than Chaff’s hand grew back because he’d found happiness. 

“Don’t pick at him, Chaff, please,” he heard as he stood there frozen, genius fucking brain completely useless to puzzle this one out. He glanced over his shoulder to see Cecelia there, her round-cheeked and pockmarked face below a cheery red headscarf, and breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s not easy for any of us,” she told Chaff mildly. “And we shouldn’t resent others for being happy, right? Especially not as bad as he had it while we were both happy.”

It was like watching a balloon deflate, something about Chaff shrinking, as if his anger had made him bigger. He nodded, half-turning away from Haymitch, towards Cecelia, as if drawn to her like a moth to a bright light. “A’right then,” he said.

Looking at the two of them, it dawned on him what had gone on between them, or at least what was growing there. The sharpest edge of his mind and tongue wanted to point out in exasperation that Chaff had done this before, that after Tansy died he’d quickly lurched to take up with Zinnia, and now here he was attentive towards Cecelia. The kinder part of him told his brain to shut the fuck up, please--Chaff wasn’t a man could bear solitude, and nothing wrong with that. He hadn’t walled himself up and done wrong by Zee, loved Zee as much as he’d ever loved Tansy, and if that was all tied up in the way he dealt with his losses, so be it. Far better to give himself passionately, even if there was an edge of desperate need to it, and to turn to love rather than to liquor. In that, he was a braver man than Haymitch had been in his grief, refusing to become closed off and alone. And though he knew Cecelia less well, he suspected from how quickly she’d married after her Games, and how she’d taken Taffeta in, that she was just the same. Dead spouses and dead kids each to mourn, and if they gave each other comfort to deal with it, all to the good. “Why don’t you head on home, Chaff?” Cecelia suggested, words almost too soft for Haymitch to hear, obviously seeing Chaff’s drunken state. “You look like you haven’t slept well. Take a nap and I’ll get Farrow, and she can play a while longer with Linsey. Come over for dinner.” 

“OK,” Chaff said, and there was a flicker of shame in his expression as he turned away. Haymitch winced inside to see it, remembering that nauseating feeling of self-disgust. Chaff managed to get down off the porch without trouble, and headed towards his house carefully, putting every foot with that slow, lurching deliberation that Haymitch recalled all too well.

“He needs help,” he told Cecelia quietly, hoping that at least she would listen. “He’s obviously falling for you and you’re probably keeping him from totally losing it, but…”

Grey-green eyes met his, calm and gentle, but she was a victor all the same, and she’d survived losing a husband and her oldest kid and Capitol captivity without breaking into pieces. He wouldn’t be fooled by that seemingly placid exterior. “He’s not going to listen to you about drinking, you know.”

“No.” That was why he’d try to talk to her. “But Cee, he was a drinker even when he was with Zee, so he’s not gonna change that just by your being there. Get him to go talk to the shrink and the like. You can’t force a drunk sober and you can’t save a drunk all by yourself, Cee, just by loving him out of it. It means a lot, not being alone, but love ain’t enough. He has to want it.”

She nodded, absorbing that, obviously picking up on his own experience with Johanna. He would never have stayed sober without her, but he could be honest enough to admit that no amount of pressure, anger, guilt, or accusation would have made him stay off the bottle. He’d needed to believe that there could be something better than a liquor-fugged oblivion, that he was capable of more. “It’s Rabe’s birthday,” she said by way of explanation. “He’s not usually this bad, but…”

He hadn’t known that, and the taste of that was bitter. So much about Chaff that he’d never known, parts Chaff kept fiercely tucked safely away in Eleven and untainted by the Games. He would have said Chaff was his best friend. Was liquor and some jokes to fight against the unbearable really all they’d had? No--he remembered Chaff and Seeder caring for him after some particularly brutal patrons, trying to bolster Chaff up after Tansy died, a thousand small moments. But like he’d told Johanna months ago, the other victors were all the two of them had, but those others, they were small pieces in the grand scheme. He sighed, running a hand through his hair again, fretfully messing it up, trying to think of where to go with this. “Yeah.”

“You haven’t exactly been there.” It wasn’t said heatedly, and was maybe as much a question as an accusation.

“I was…” He tried to think how to explain it. It wasn’t that he’d been too insanely busy with the war and Johanna and the kids, or at least, that wasn’t all of it. “I needed time to be alone when it was me. Too many people stopping by the house all the time, saying how sorry they were, how wonderful my ma and Ash and Briar were. I couldn’t stand it after a while. The looks, the awkwardness--I didn’t want to pester him when he maybe needed space.” 

“That’s how you work, maybe, but not how he works.” He heard the mild reproach in it, the defensiveness of Chaff. Chaff needed people. He’d known that, but not really thought about it.

Something dropped away, like canvas covering a statue and revealing it now, but it was no masterpiece, ugly and misshapen. “And I didn’t know if we were just Games friends, all right? If it was enough once we were out of the Capitol.” The same old ugly specter there, telling him that his uses were limited and his worth precisely nothing. “And that he’d probably want to have a drink while we talked. I didn’t know he was hitting it that hard, Cee, but...I wasn’t sure I couldn’t handle that, or if it’d be rude to refuse when he’d probably intend it in memory of them.” Being around the drinkers at the sawmill ball was tough enough, but he’d managed. Sitting there with a man who’d been his drinking buddy for years, he wasn’t sure he could resist. There was solid friendship there, but it had floated on a sea of alcohol for so long that he wasn’t sure what it would be like without it. But he’d have to find out. If Chaff needed or wanted him there, he’d be there. 

She nodded again, more slowly that time, and the left corner of her mouth ticked for a moment, a tense motion that he wasn’t sure whether it was a grimace or a smile. “And now?”

“Whatever I can do.” But Johanna’s warning to him rose in his mind, her on-the-nose observation about his inability to be reasonable about how deep he got into something, to let others step in and handle it. He’d been hands-off on Chaff, and there had to be some middle ground between that and throwing himself right into it full force. It wasn’t easy to give over control like that, but he’d let Cecelia direct this dance. “You tell me, all right?”

“Give him some space for a few days. Then maybe you and Johanna should come over to my place for dinner. I’ll invite Chaff.” Delicately done, with a finesse that reminded him of Madge’s quietly steely competence, and he smiled in spite of himself to hear it. “I know I wouldn’t have made it out of the Quell. Or Chaff.” She said it without self-pity. “You’re the one that made the plan, the one we victors agreed to follow. Not Katniss--she was just a girl caught up in things too big for her, I think, but she didn’t care a stitch for any of us. Not even Johanna, because she just wanted to go out with a middle finger held high. It’s you that gave us and all of Panem a chance. Don’t you think we’ll forget that so easy.”

“Thanks,” he said softly, feeling an oddly heavy feeling in his chest, like it was too much to accept. His plans cost the woman her husband and her son, and here she was, thanking him. That was the thing he couldn’t admit to her either, but he had the unnerving sense she might have seized on it all the same. He’d helped make Chaff a widower, helped get two of his kids killed. _Not your fault,_ he reminded himself, almost sensing Roarke’s questions that would probe him, make him admit that it wasn’t his guilt. Wrapped himself in any blame he could seize for so long was a bad habit. But just because it was Snow’s shame, and not his, didn’t mean he couldn’t feel the weight of the lives lost in this fight he’d helped start. The day he forgot the worth of a life was the day he became too much like Snow and Coin, and life really wouldn’t be worth living anymore. 

It was good hearing the sounds of the kids again, noisy happy sounds getting louder as they approached the stairs--Clover obviously had got them together, and it was a welcome distraction. “Haymitch?” His name was said so quietly he almost missed it, but he turned his attention back from the staircase, watching for the kids, to Cecelia, arms folded over her chest now. “Are there any plans about Eight?”

He sighed, feeling oddly like a chastened schoolkid for the second time in about five minutes. “I’m trying to push it, Cee. Believe me.”

“No hurry on Twelve either, I’m sure.”

“No.” She’d lived through the last winter and spring in Eight, seen how heavily fortified her district was and how tightly the fist of Capitol control clenched. She understood better than anyone, maybe even Johanna, just how hopeless the situation was in Eight and Twelve right now, and why it burned all the more that Coin so easily dismissed the districts suffering the most.

Seeing Lacey run downstairs into Cecelia’s arms, it was good to leave the conversation there, given there was nothing good to say, and the kids didn’t need to see them weighed down by heavy matters like that. He’d seen how observant they could be, too young to understand but old enough to suffer the anxiety of reading a dark or angry mood in the adults in their lives. Spying Posy beaming and babbling happily about a drawing as she hurried downstairs too, he gave himself over to that small ray of happiness--at least he was doing one thing in his life right.

He hiked Lindy into his arms and held Posy’s hand on the way back to the house, and dropped them off, where they scampered upstairs in a rush. Saturday, so of course Posy would be glad to not have any schoolwork. Madge and Peeta were out on another of their long afternoon walks. Laurel--well, they’d made a room ready for her and chances were she’d get out of the infirmary tomorrow, but he could still see the wariness in her when he went to check on her. After the outburst from pain or terror while she’d been giving birth, now she’d clammed up again and said very little, watching everything with a suspicious eye when they told her that she’d come to live with them, would never have to go back to the community home. 

She reminded him of Katniss with that attitude. Right--and what would he do? Hope there was some boy out there who’d idolized and frighteningly idealized her every bit as much as she had him, and throw them into a life-and-death situation? Yeah, that had worked out so well the last time. Not to mention he had the feeling the last thing the girl needed right now was any boy’s attention--or girl’s, if that was where she naturally inclined when it wasn’t about peddling herself to stave off starvation. Maybe that was best left to Johanna and their mothers for now. He might actually get good at this notion of stepping back and letting other people solve problems.

Still, the images swam through his mind, dark and heavy as a lump of coal: Laurel’s hard hazel eyes and Cecelia’s quiet despair over Eight and Chaff’s bleary gaze and slumped shoulders. So after he slipped his slush-damp boots off and Johanna then found him getting his jacket off and shepherded him into the quiet of the parlor, muttering something about building up the fire so it would be ready after dinner, he didn’t resist. Shutting the door behind them, he turned to her, reaching out. She slipped so easily into his arms now, feeling as though she belonged there, a piece that had been missing so long, and the sensation of her arms close around him in return felt so right. But when she stretched up to kiss him and he instinctively turned his face so that her lips grazed his jaw instead, he felt her pause, stiffen for a moment, as if trying to read through the moment. It wasn’t like he had an aversion to this. In those weeks since he’d kissed her after the dance, sneaking a kiss or an embrace even during daylight hours became common enough. Five minutes before dinner? Hide away in the bathroom. A moment before tucking Posy and Lindy in? Pause in their bedroom. It made him laugh ruefully, feeling like the two of them were a pair of teenagers hiding out from their parents, but it didn’t seem silly. Besides, he’d seen other kids’ parents stealing a kiss and a private moment when he was little--not his folks, obviously, given how much they had to hide. Maybe that was their reward, him and Johanna, something simple and joyful, for the sometimes still-thorny moments up in their bedroom as they kept pushing the boundaries of what was comfortable. Pushing more and more, and it wasn’t more clothes coming off that bothered them so much as putting aside their defenses, accepting and then even wanting a touch rather than enduring.

But he wasn’t in the mood for a kiss right now, for being playful. He felt her fingers tighten in his shirt. “Hey,” she said, voice a low murmur in his ear. “What’s ripping you across the grain today, honey?” He couldn’t say exactly when _darlin’_ became anything other than a snarky pet name he tossed at her mostly to tease, and when her answering retort of _honeybear_ shortened to _honey_ and became real too, but it had, and hearing that felt like a gentle light came into his mind and heart, chasing away some of the clouds. 

“Just a lot of shit on my mind,” he answered her softly. Should have known she wouldn’t settle for that, because he heard the low grunt of annoyance she made in reply. “Chaff’s drinking fit to flood a mineshaft. That’s the big thing. I’m not gonna meddle more than he and Cecelia want me to,” and he noticed her total lack of surprise at the mention of Cecelia, “but it’s there all the same.”

She didn’t say anything, but she held him a little tighter at that, probably knowing all the things in his head about Chaff and alcohol and the struggle of it all, and he couldn’t help the surge of gratitude that she didn’t insist on words. He pressed a light kiss to her cheek by way of apology, and stayed there after that, forehead touching hers, simply breathing in the scent of her and living in that moment of being cared for and secure. Grateful almost beyond bearing for having her, and the man he’d become because of it, crawling out of hell as he had because for once, he hadn’t been left alone to drown. 

Standing there caught in that feeling, he heard the footsteps in the kitchen, and the noise of their mothers, apparently back from digging through the cellar for more supplies for dinner. “...the hell we’re supposed to do with all these turnips, I don’t rightly know,” Magnolia said with a sigh. “Bumper crop in Eleven, apparently.”

“At least they keep a while.” He and Johanna froze, as if afraid to make a sound and be caught. Nothing to be ashamed of, but maybe too much secrecy over the years, and the fierce need to keep this thing between them private and theirs alone, made for an iron-tough habit. A pause, and then Petra’s voice went softer. “He’ll be fine, Nola. Just a little turn-of-season cold, and he comes from tough stock, you know.”

“You haven’t heard him the last few days. Barking cough, the wheezing.” Magnolia answered her grimly. “I know the sound of likely pneumonia when I hear it. Miners caught it all the time down in the cold and damp. And it’s one thing to shed it when you’re twenty. He’s from tough stock, sure, but he’s past eighty now and…” Her voice wavered, and some part of him that was and always would be his mother’s child hurt to hear it, throwing back all too easily to those years where he would have done anything, anything at all to help her and spare her more pain.

Fog was sick? He must have hidden it well these last few days, but of course Haymitch had a lot on his mind too, thinking of Laurel and all the other issues at hand. _You’re slipping, old man._ “Well, we’ll make sure he stays in bed a bit and bring him some soup, right? He must have been hiding it from Peeta and Madge too, given they work with him so closely.”

Some of the heavy weight left Magnolia’s voice, obviously rallying either from Petra’s attempt at positive thinking, or just her own will. “I think those two have other things on their mind too besides compiling intel, Pet.”

“Mm. If they’re not taking contraceptive tonic already…”

“They’d better start soon. Last thing they need is to end up like that poor girl. Laurel.” Another of those heavy silences. He wondered anew if there was something in those years before his ma met Fog, those early years where she’d been just like Laurel, a dirt-poor girl selling the only thing she had in order to make ends meet. She’d been under sixteen the first time. Near seven years before he was even conceived. He didn’t have another sibling out there, did he? 

“Should we sit them down for the talk, or is that jumping on the kids’ turf?”

He felt Johanna stiffen in his arms, rather like an irritated cat getting its back up, and felt the same grumpiness that their parents assumed they were so shy, or naive, as to not tell a pair of teenagers about the risks of sex. They’d had that talk already--all right, in a glancing way, because it would have been cruel to give a matter-of-fact talk about contraception to someone still grieving. Although in hindsight, maybe he should have pushed it more. The two of them could have always been completely reckless in their sorrow and ended up in bed together. Given different circumstances, ones that hadn’t forced them to open their mouths and talk rather than simply let it all build until it grew too much, even he and Johanna might. 

“I’m wondering if they might need that reminder themselves. If they’re not sleeping together yet, I’d say they’re damn close to it.”

Oh, now this had entered the incredibly awkward stage, and he could feel the heat rising in him at the thought of being that easily read. And again, the flash of temper that they thought they both were so ignorant as to not think about it--they weren’t the teenagers that their mothers had left, all those years ago. Though, granted, they hadn’t exactly discussed it, but--for fuck’s sake. They had six kids now, with Laurel. There was a war on. It wasn’t like there was a rush to get Johanna knocked up. He didn’t even know if she wanted more kids, if some part of her hungered for it. Reluctantly, he had to admit if nothing else, it was something that needed to be discussed.

“And nothing’s foolproof.” Petra gave a wry laugh. “Heike, you know. I took that tonic regular as anything, but long boring winters here in Seven, and there I was, puking my guts out before we even left for the logging camps...didn’t mean we loved her any less.” 

Another laugh, equally wry and knowing, and Magnolia answered, “I could barely afford it but always took it before I saw Phin, and that was only maybe once or twice a month. And there I was--a two-year widow suddenly expecting another kid. The odds weren’t in my favor, eh?” Well, that explained Ash. Not that she’d loved Ash any less either for it, and he could follow the logic enough himself to recognize he wasn’t exactly a planned-for child either.

The laughter died down and Petra said, voice soft and uncertain, “I doubt they want another kid right now, if at all. But though there’s a part of me that wishes...look, obsessive as Thirteen is about kids and fertility, they wouldn’t let her back into the fight if she was pregnant.” 

“I can imagine.” 

“Is that awful of me?”

“No, it just means you’re a ma trying to protect her kid.”

“They’d probably send Haymitch into the fray, though. And if she lost him…” He felt Johanna stir in his arms, reacting to the thought of it, then realized she’d stepped back quietly, jerking a thumb towards the door back to the hallway. Stepping carefully, as silently as they could, they sneaked back out into the hallway and up the stairs. He winced as the fourth stair creaked, but he could hear the rhythm of voices from the kitchen, if not their content by that point, and apparently it wasn’t overheard. She didn’t let go his hand, as if she couldn’t bear to after hearing the notion of being separated from him, stuck at home while he went off to possibly die. He felt like he couldn’t let her go either in that moment.

He sat down on the bed beside her, and for a moment it felt oddly like the CPC again, awkward and uncertain. “They raise a good point, actually,” he said. “A baby would be one good way to quietly remove yourself from Coin’s radar by not coming back to the battlefield.”

“And you?” she said, temper obvious in her voice. “Going to go get killed in the fray because nobody’s gonna guard your back like I do? But hey, at least I’ll have your baby, and six other kids besides, so what a fucking consolation propo for Plutarch that’s gonna be! Hell, Coin might well _get_ you killed just to fire up the last push of the war like that.” She shook her head angrily.

He glanced down at his hands. First instinct as always to reach for the strategy and its uses, to not think about his feelings, because they were usually unbearable and he had to kill them with liquor. But the feeling that washed over him now was something guilty, tawdry. He thought about Laurel’s unwanted son--no, it wouldn’t be like that, neither Heike nor Ash were expected, but they were loved all the same. But there was something relentlessly mercenary about the idea of conceiving a baby as a strategic measure that he couldn’t bear, maybe because he was a father already. “It’s a bad idea anyway, practically speaking. We already said we weren’t rushing into the sex. We’d have to start tonight, hope you get pregnant pretty much immediately.” After all, the war would start up again in little more than a month, he suspected. The thaw was coming and probably only the unrest in the Capitol had stopped things this far, everyone eyeing to see what came of that and if it was the right moment to strike.

“Can’t be like Katniss and claim a fake pregnancy.” She shook her head. “I still can’t believe the Capitol was dumb enough to not insist on a pregnancy test.”

“On their dearest darling? Accuse her of being a liar? Oh, Snow wasn’t going to risk that.” He smiled at her, humorlessly. “Also, why do you think we sprang it at the eleventh hour like that?”

“Yeah, well.” She cleared her throat noisily, nervously, hand resting on her knee. “Mom means well, and I get why she said it. But if we had another kid, I’d want it to be because we want it.”

“So do you?”

She chewed her lip for a moment. “I don’t know that I _need_ one. Love the ones we’ve got. But I guess I’m not so opposed to it that I feel like one of us needs to go so drastic as to get the babymaking works tied off to make sure.”

“About where I’m at,” he admitted, relieved they were actually on the same page. “Honestly, it ain’t like we have much time to think about it right now.” 

“But they’re right. Once you and I actually get to the sex, it’s a risk.” The tone in her voice called to mind the fond but rueful laughs of Magnolia and Petra talking about their pregnancies, that sense of knowing that only women had that shut him out. “I mean, nothing’s sure short of sterilization or Capitol injections, and we’re not gonna get our hands on those anytime soon.”

“Maybe we need to encourage Coin to capture Three in a hurry,” he told her, tongue-in-cheek, reaching for her hand again and gratified that she took it. “Randiness is a great motivator. Hide the fact it’s so you, me, and everyone can have blissfully risk-free sex.”

“Shit, she’d burn that factory to the ground if she knew.”

“I wouldn’t put it past her to do that anyway. For the good of the population.” She looked at him, eyes wide with surprise, and the full weight of his own quip hit him and they ended up laughing helplessly, snorting and wheezing and his ribs reminded him that they still had touchy spots sometimes and it hurt a bit, but he couldn’t help it. It was a dark joke but another of the kind they so often shared, where it was OK to laugh because that was the only way to handle it, and neither of them would judge. 

“We’ll get by,” she said a while later, once they both calmed down, reaching for his hand again. “I’ll take whatever tonic we’ve got to prevent it, but...if it happens, it happens.” But his thoughts went to Laurel then, inevitably, and Johanna was older, wider-hipped, but the risk stayed. He could lose her there too, far away from a battlefield, and the thought hurt. Her eyes lowered then, looking away from him. “Do you think...Laurel’s son…we’ll plant the tree and all, later, but the tag? His name?”

They’d buried that little boy this morning, up in the quiet Memorial Grove. Trees there with brass tags for the loved ones lost, from great giants decades old to tiny saplings. He suspected there would be many more of those soon, for ones who’d never come back from the woods. They hadn’t planted a tree yet for the baby, with the still-hard ground, and certainly, there was no brass tag like on the others. He’d noticed Gunnar and Petra and Johanna all awkwardly avoided the trees Johanna had planted for them, and for Bern and Heike as well, as if the spectre of it was too much to bear. They’d all focused on the task at hand, burying the poor tiny kid who’d never even had a chance to live. He might be the bastard of an orphan girl, but at least in death he’d not be alone, buried with Johanna’s kin. But no name for that tag: not yet. He nodded, sighing to himself. “The tree’s not there yet. And she should have the chance to name him, if she wants.” She might not, though. Might want to forget everything about him, and if that was the case, well, he wouldn’t hold it against her at all, but they’d name him. Make him an Abernathy or Mason if need be.

He squeezed her hand then, getting up from the bed with a protesting creak of the springs. “I should go see Fog,” he said. “If he’s sick, figure out where we go with things while he’s down for the count.” 

The slanted glance and lifted eyebrows she gave him told him that she knew that wasn’t the only factor at work, but she wasn’t going to push him. “Good of you to look after him. I’m sure your mom’s more worried than she lets on.” 

He headed downstairs, Gunnar and Petra now at work cooking, saying his ma had gotten drawn into storytime with the littles. That was good, easier to not have to deal with her on this. Leaning on the counter, he made sure to give no indication that he and Johanna had listened in, and soon enough, carefully he fished out the information Magnolia told Petra. “Oh, the old man’s sick? I’ll bring him some soup and the like, see what he’s got for us. Probably be happier if he knows the work’s going on while he’s recovering.”

Gunnar handed him some of the soup. “It’s interesting,” Petra said, giving him one of those intense glances that Johanna obviously inherited. “He’s always ‘the old man’ to you. Or ‘Fog’.”

“And?” he countered sharply, realizing even as he said it that told both of them how much it got to him that he got that defensive and didn’t blow it off with a casual remark. Not to mention it was a Johanna-esque reaction, and they were likely familiar.

Gunnar’s wry smile hammered that point home harder. “Johanna says your girl Katniss was just the same way towards you.” Yeah, well, he hadn’t been fucking Katniss’ mother and all and claiming it was mere tawdry prostitution, so it wasn’t exactly a great comparison.

Fuck’s sake, were _all_ the Masons trying to prod something from him right now about Phineas Fog? Good thing Bern and Heike weren’t here to add to it. He had the sense of stepping into quicksand if he kept running his mouth, so he took the soup and left.

But the notion was in his head now. He wasn’t a thing like Katniss, thanks very much. She’d made it obvious with her conflict of depending on him to get her out of the jams she was in, even as she disliked him. He was nothing less than polite to the old man. But his ma’s carefully hidden fears nagged at him all the same. Heading over to the house their parents shared, he opened the door, left unlocked, and headed upstairs. Finding their bedroom, he rapped on the door and opened it. “Sent me over with some soup.”

Fog glanced up, eyes red-rimmed and tired behind his glasses, propped up on pillows and reading what must be intel reports. Certainly wasn’t a novel. “Ma’ll probably chew your ass out if she finds you working, you know,” he said dryly, setting the soup down on the nightstand.

“Work stops for nobody.” But he put the papers down.

“You gonna be all right?”

Fog raised an eyebrow at that. He could remember easily when those brows, and the hair, were barely brindled with grey, as opposed to being mostly white now. “I’ll do. Nola dosed me up with cough syrup. So long as I’m not coughing, it’s all right.”

That weird feeling of discomfort welled up again. He never knew what to make of this man, and it showed, and Fog didn’t know what to make of him. But he didn’t look like he was on death’s door, and that was a reassurance. “Get your rest.”

Fog nodded, an absent-minded gesture, scooting to sit up further and carefully putting aside the cell phone that he’d obviously been using to take down more reports. “How’s the girl--Laurel?”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say, _Considering you bought my ma for a while, and who knows how many other girls, as if you care about a girl a Peacekeeper knocked up_ , but it was a defensive cruelty he didn’t want to throw out there. “Recovering well enough.”

The silence fell again. Fog fidgeted with the covers, gnarled hands toying with the blankets. “Vick and Posy.”

“Yes?”

“Hawthorne.” He breathed in deeply, as if bracing himself for something, and Haymitch saw the racking shudder as he suppressed a cough from the action. Fog’s voice was thready after that, though he had the feeling it wasn’t simply the physical strain. “I assume Lorna Hawthorne was family to them.”

“Lorna was their aunt.” He didn’t state the obvious: _So you do remember her name._ The girl he’d hanged all those years ago for poaching, that fall after Haymitch’s first Games as a mentor. There he’d been after the sickening feeling of butchering a deer in the woods with Burt, bloody hands and predator’s grace, and being questioned hard by a Peacekeeper about the deer meat in their packs, claiming it was a horse he’d bought off old Callum the butcher.

Hearing the news, they’d raced to the square to see Lorna hanging there. There he was, seventeen and flipping out, all caught up in his fear and guilt, and Fog had been...what? At the time he’d seen Phineas Fog standing there, impassive and brusque in his white uniform as a fifteen-year-old girl twisted in the wind, after dying hard from how light she was. 

Mouthing platitudes about the law, in that moment Fog was everything he’d loathed, the man who’d dispassionately fucked his mother and then led the execution of her, his girlfriend, his brother who was Fog’s own son; all thoughtless obedience and Capitol cruelty. 

_”Lorna Hawthorne had been caught and punished twice before for poaching. Death by hanging is the sentence given by Capitol law for a third offense.” Oh, bullshit. Haymitch knew plenty of people got off for a fifth, sixth, seventh offense with just a whipping. Now he glanced at Haymitch more directly and said almost defiantly, “As you’ve been flogged twice yourself in the last four years perhaps you should have paid attention to that particular penalty. Clearly I’ve been too lax in enforcement lately that the girl thought she could just walk out of the woods right in front of four Peacekeepers.”_

Now he replayed that moment frantically in his mind, trying to see it through the new lens that distorted everything. The price Fog paid for Ash’s life, alluded to in how he’d been expected to crack down on everyone. The way Fog wouldn’t look at him as he tonelessly cited the law, the way he wouldn’t look at Lorna--not dismissive contempt, but guilt? That tense body in that white uniform. The couple of years that followed until Fog retired and Dulcet took over, and how Fog always seemed so utterly dispassionate even as he inflicted Capitol law to the last crossed “t” and dotted “i”. He’d seen Thread now with his unfeeling adherence to brutal laws, and Dulcet’s barely-concealed sadistic joy. 

Perhaps Haymitch wasn’t the only one in Twelve with Capitol eyes hard on him in the wake of supposed treason. He hadn’t forgotten Lorna’s name, in all these years. And Haymitch suspected there were plenty of others carved there like granite tombstones, the unbearable burden of the dead. Fog had pointed out sharply that Haymitch had delivered up tribute after tribute to the slaughter rather than taking them and running into the woods, but faced with the choice of two dead or wholesale murder visited on Twelve for defiance, what choice was there? Hard choices, impossible ones, but someone had to make them. He’d done it, all these years, and Fog had as well, and they would carry the weight of that with them until they died. They’d done the best they possibly could, but it still meant people suffered for it.

He wasn’t the ten-year-old who’d resented Fog’s occasionally absent efforts to be nice to him and Ash, or even the seventeen-year-old who hated him for what he thought Fog was and had done. “They’re the last remaining Hawthornes. Maybe it’s right that you end up helping raise them.”

A mixture of guilt and hope flickered in Fog’s eyes--maybe the hope of absolution. “Maybe so.”

“Do you really care about Laurel, or are you asking to be polite?” 

“Are you really asking about your mother and me?” Fog countered, voice taking on an edge. “You never asked.”

“So tell me.” He leaned against the nightstand, waiting. They’d both been waiting for this for a good thirty-five years, hadn’t they? Ever since Haymitch was old enough to realize some things about his ma and the Head Peacekeeper.

“Yes, I paid a few women before her in my time in the Peacekeepers. When it got to be too much, being that alone. But mostly I stuck to women in the Corps during my first twenty years. It was less sad that way. But as Head, being in authority over any female officers, not an option. Nola was...she knocked on my door on a bad night. I’d sent other women away before, thought it was unbecoming to be so...weak.” _So human._ Lonely and wanting so much to simply be touched, to be seen, but meaningless sex was the only way it could happen. He could have laughed, a painful sort of laughter, at how familiar it sounded. ”So yes, I paid for her, two weeks in a row.” There was a hint of red in Fog’s cheeks now that was more than a fever. “Third time, she came over when I’d just finished making dinner. I asked if she wanted to eat. Paid her triple to just sit, sit and talk.” He looked away, as he had at Lorna’s hanging. “The company meant more than sex ever could. I didn’t touch her again for a couple months, and only because she kissed me first. Whether you believe me or not.”

He did. And he’d seen how Fog looked at her, the way he’d risked everything to get her and Briar out alive. He’d tried, and sometimes failed, but he’d tried. Done plenty in the years since to try to atone for what sins he had, and fight with what weapons he could forge. More than Haymitch himself, even, drinking himself down the drain for lack of any agency at all. “You’ve done the best you could with what you had,” he said quietly, looking over at Fog. He didn’t mean Magnolia, or not just about her. Perhaps the only person who could really offer absolution was someone who’d been through it, who could understand but be a harsh judge without cheap excuses.

Fog nodded slowly at that, as if absorbing it, but something in his steel-straight spine eased, only a little. It wasn’t a slump of dejection--relief of putting down a burden, if Haymitch had to put a name to it.

Seeing him with the kids, his still-awkward but sincere affection for them, how he’d sacrificed for Ash’s survival, he didn’t need to ask. Given the chance, Fog would have been there for him and Ash as a father, for more than occasionally trying to slip them candy and the like.

He looked at the man, seeing him back in his forties, imprisoned in that white uniform as surely as Haymitch was in his Capitol frock coats and fancy vests, and chained down by the burdens of secrecy and loneliness and guilt he carried. _My father, all right._ Undeniable at that, and better to be the son of a flawed man who tried as best the world would let him rather than the drunk asshole he’d figured on claiming paternity for so long.

That was how it had been, wasn’t it? Blair Abernathy’s shadow stretched long over the years, clasping dark fingers around him even today thinking of Chaff and Farrow. He’d decided long ago, with a child’s defiance, that he didn’t need a father, that no father at all was better than _that_ man and the imprint of fear he’d managed to leave on even a two-year-old boy, or the Head Peacekeeper he figured was abusing his mother. He’d be Ash’s brother and father all at once, if he had to be. Even when Fog came back, he’d continued with that: he was forty-one, he’d damn well taken care of himself all his life, he didn’t need a father now. Gunnar and Petra were right. In that defiant sense, he'd been exactly like Katniss, the passive resentment of not wanting anyone to claim that space that had been left empty when he needed someone there the most.

Perhaps he still didn’t need a father, not in the usual sense. But it wasn’t all about what he needed. Peeta and Katniss hadn’t needed a father exactly either at their ages, but he could feel the change in him, like a parched river drinking in a rainfall, at seeing how they turned to him, relied on him. They made him matter. He’d needed that from them as much as they’d needed his wits and clever tongue. And now, Peeta looked even more to him, as did Madge, and the younger ones; when Posy called him “Dad”, it hit him with the force of a sledgehammer. If the kids hadn’t been there and it might have scared them, he might have ended up crying from the overwhelming emotion of it.

Because now he had a place, and he belonged. Not simply because of courtesy or need, but affection. He’d seen that with Fog too, that melancholy sense of being an island still, relating easily to Madge and Peeta but uncertain compared to the effortless way Magnolia, Petra, and Gunnar had with the younger kids. He’d become a husband but there was a part of Phineas Fog that would always be locked away in that intimidating uniform, wistfully watching Magnolia walking through the Seam with her two little boys, never able to reclaim his chance to truly be a father. The Capitol took that from him, long ago. Haymitch had gotten that chance back.

“You’d best focus on getting better before anything else. Ma’s worried about you and pneumonia, and she doesn’t need that.”

Fog’s lips twitched up in a wry grin. “Still pissed off at the idea I’d ever hurt your mother? Forty-odd years and some things never, ever change.” But it was a lighthearted joke all the same, and better that way rather than dwelling on all the dark thoughts both of them were prone to have. 

So maybe they’d never be effortless either, and he couldn’t give Fog all those lost years. But he could give him something else: let go of all the years of suspicion and bitterness, break both of them out of that vicious cycle they’d been in so long ago. He couldn’t call this man _Pa_ , but maybe Posy and Johanna had stumbled onto the right answer. “Yeah, well. Die, and I swear I’ll never forgive you...Dad.” He made sure the last word didn’t have any snide twist to it, no flippancy.

He couldn’t quite resist the faint feeling of satisfaction at having aced Fog--Phineas--from the startled look on his face, the lack of a ready comeback. Best to make his exit before it turned into something awkward, and give him the privacy to mull that over. He grinned and said, “Sleep tight.” 

Of course, right as he was about to cheerfully retire on that, Phineas came up with the clincher. He held up a couple of papers. “Fine, I’ll sleep, _son_ , but you’ll want to take these reports to your mother and the rest.” The slow smile of satisfaction on his face, the glimmer in his eyes, could only mean good news. “Looks like Snow was assassinated this morning in the Capitol.”


	46. Chapter 46

Laurel jumped three red checkers in a zigzag, neatly putting her black checker down right in front of Peeta, on the last row of the board. “Kings.”

Madge gave a low chuckle, smirking at Peeta and giving him a sidelong glance with those big blue eyes. “And here I remember you bragging about your chess abilities, let alone checkers?”

Peeta looked over at Laurel and smiled ruefully, flipping her checker over, as she looked away, awkward at him staring over at her. “Kings,” he agreed, turning and studying the board intently.

Laurel didn’t say anything about all the games of checkers they played in the community home, for lack of other toys. The schedule list for the checkerboard and the few books they had was something strict, and strictly obeyed. Could have been worse. At least being in Seven, they got the overprint books, or the ones with a page or two messed up or missing. The two checkers sets were mismatched odds and ends, bits of scrap wood from the workshops, and only two real red checkers and one black remained. Over the years--decades, probably--the rest all got lost somewhere along the way. Kids in other districts probably didn’t have even that.

Madge stayed where she was, seated on a third side of the table on a throw pillow of her own, eyeing every move and probably trying to figure out what to do to beat whoever won. Laurel had heard she was the daughter of Twelve’s mayor, executed months ago now. Even with as poor as Twelve was, worse off than Seven, she still grew up rich. Probably had pretty dresses and more than enough to eat and parents who gave a damn. People who were horrified she’d been thrown into a Hunger Games.

She hadn’t spent much time with them yet in the two days since Johanna escorted her here from the infirmary, given she’d slept most of them. But with the little kids napping and the adults busy muttering about some big conference call between the Capitol and Thirteen and the rebels, she’d ended up stuck with her new would-be siblings for the afternoon. It took only about five minutes before Peeta awkwardly suggested checkers.

Seeing the two of them, almost sensing the bond there like it was a visible thing, she felt a sudden urge to make some smartass remark. Two cute perfect blond dolls from Twelve making eyes at each other. Less than a year ago he’d been kissing Katniss Everdeen. Kissing and far more, given he’d knocked her up.

Stupid. So stupid--Katniss hadn’t been so pregnant as to show, so obviously it happened after they read the Quell card and they knew the risk of her being pregnant in the arena. And they were victors. They must have had access to more than a stolen bottle of contraceptive tonic like her, so they’d simply been careless. Peeta and his big grand romantic notions didn’t even care that so early into pregnancy, Katniss would be slower, and tired, and vulnerable. Laurel could remember those early weeks out in the woods all too well, how hard they were to simply keep going when all she wanted to do was sleep, and keeping anything down in her stomach became a chore. Him and his stupid mindless penis maybe helped get Katniss killed, and here he was flirting with cute sweet innocent _pure_ little Madge, like he barely remembered the wife he’d supposedly loved more than anything. All men were like that, it seemed like. Once they slept with a woman, she meant nothing: just another tree they’d pissed on and could claim.

The more she saw them flirting, the more it disgusted her. All of Peeta’s smiles and warmth in the few days she arrived seemed to take on a sinister gloss, all fake and plastic. Maybe he hadn’t even loved Katniss at all. Maybe he’d just played her, gotten her to save his life because he knew after that reaping and Katniss’ kid sister, no way anyone cared about him. And he’d kept working that angle all through the Quell, to keep eyes on him. Married her, gotten her knocked up--Katniss seemed like the sort that trusted too easily, cared too much. He could have tricked her. He worked with the spies and the intelligence even now, so he was smart and able to keep secrets and lies. It made it all seem gross now, that supposed epic romance everyone sighed over last year, like on closer inspection the sweetly adorable sickly shade of pink was actually a pile of reeking bloody puke.

She couldn’t take it anymore, so she shook her head and stood up from her pillow, scooping it up and tossing it back on the couch, holding back a twinge at her still-sore body protesting the abrupt movement. Between her legs, and even the pressure of a sweater on her sore breasts--she’d have to empty them again soon. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of seeing how much she hurt. “Hope he takes better care of you than he did Katniss once he’s gotten his dick in you,” she fired at Madge, turning her back and almost enjoying the gasps behind her.

Padding towards the kitchen, she glanced around the doorframe and saw nobody there. Good, she’d hoped for that. A bowl of apples sat on the counter, fresh up from the cellar, and old Petra had said something about making apple butter with them before they really went off. Some of them had a few brown spots and they might be a little mealy given they’d likely been down there for a while in the winter cold, but that hardly mattered. She’d eaten far worse in her day, and her ravenous stomach, eating only soup and the like for the last few days, rumbled and told her it was time to make up for that. She couldn’t keep going if she was weak and starved. Grabbing two apples, she hesitated for a moment and juggled them into the crook of her arm, then added a third. With any luck she’d scarf them down in a hurry and get rid of the cores without anyone noticing, and it was such a big bowl. Just in case, clutching the apples in her arm, she carefully rearranged the heap of them with her other hand, trying to cover the absence. Hopefully Petra hadn’t counted.

“If you’re hungry…” The voice was deep, masculine, with that twang that wasn’t Seven-- _Peacekeeper?_. She instinctively flinched and dropped the apples to the oil-slick dark tile floor, hearing one of them hit with a wet mushy _squish_ as it landed on an already-bruised spot.

Haymitch stood there, watching her, eyes narrowed slightly as he studied her. It was like it had been with Paul--Polonius. Caught red-handed with the food she couldn’t explain away, and there he was looking at her, no escape, no excuse, and the panic fluttered in her stomach like something battered its way around in there with razor-tipped wings.

But she wasn’t an ignorant kid like last time. She’d learned better. She’d get ahead of it this time, and with Paul it turned into clawing her way out from under his thumb until he was the one that needed her and she could better call the shots and the price, but the price here would end up as Haymitch’s silence. He’d never be able to throw her out if she threatened to tell his wife about this. Chances were Johanna would toss her out anyway if she heard, but she’d take the chance Haymitch’s terror of Johanna knowing, what she’d think of him, would keep his mouth shut. 

Besides...that heavy feeling in her chest told her this would have happened anyway. She’d seen him watching her with that intense stare of his ever since she walked in the house. Seemed like it wasn’t just television with him and Johanna, even if they weren’t the type to be all over each other, pawing and panting, though that was hardly love. But love apparently didn’t stop a lot of men from fucking around, especially when they knew a girl wasn’t a lily-white virgin anymore and so was ripe for the taking. Hell, even the boys at the community home tried to wheedle her into it once they knew she’d been selling. It was only a matter of time before Haymitch cornered her somewhere and demanded it as the price for her staying here, wasn’t it? At least this way it happened on her terms, and she’d come out of it with a bargaining chip. 

At least he wasn’t that bad looking for someone past forty. Being a victor, even a drunk, didn’t wear a person out the way hard labor did. That shaggy, wavy black hair, and even the scar on his cheek managed to somehow make him look dangerous alongside those bright, intense eyes. The fact he didn’t look Seven didn’t bother her, Paul hadn’t been from Seven either. So she stepped forward, looking up into his face, and made herself smile, eyes heavy-lidded, voice a little husky. “Nobody needs to know about the apples, right?” Her hand landed exactly where she intended--upper thigh, feeling the heat of his skin through his jeans. Not so forward enough to directly grab his cock, but making the implicit promise unmistakable.

His eyes went cool and expressionless, like looking into silver mirrors. He smiled, a slow cynical curve of his lips, as if the whole thing entertained him, looking right at her, challenging her to look away and back down. He reached down and carefully pulled her hand off him. It was a casually amused tone as he said, “Mm, bit young for handling the likes of me just yet, girl. Come back in a few years and we’ll have a real good time.” 

With the touch of his fingers on her wrist, the relief flooded her when he let go quickly. The oddly hollow feeling in the middle of all of it told her some naive idiot part of her actually hoped he’d be better than that. That he’d be horrified at the idea and tell her that wasn’t part of letting her stay, not looking at her in that way like he’d utterly overwhelm her if only she was a little older. That was insane, given if he was sickened at the idea, he’d be sickened by her, just another cheap little whore, and she’d have ruined everything, but the two ideas jostled in there anyway, clashing and churning, slow and sick. 

Leaning on the counter, caught up in her own mind, it took her a few seconds to recover awareness of him and see it. How he’d backed off well out of reach, the hand clapped over his mouth like he was either trying to stifle words already said, or not puke. Other arm wrapped around himself like he was trying to protect himself from something. Shaking his head from side to side--no, he was shaking, period. “Fuck.” The word came out half-muffled between this fingers, and he dropped his hand, reaching behind him as if finding something to steady himself. “Fuck...I’m sorry…”

The look of sick horror on his face said it all. He’d never be able to keep this from Johanna, and nobody would believe her that she wasn’t a sex-crazy slut. After all, she’d made the first move, hadn’t she? “I’ll just get packing,” she mumbled, feeling the hot nauseating wave of shame rolling through her. Not like she had that much to pack anyway, her things barely filled a single drawer in the room they’d told her she’d share with Madge. Four empty drawers in that dresser, mocking her. If she hurried she could be out and on the way back down the hill to the community home in less than ten minutes, and nobody the wiser. But he stood there, blocking the way out, like Paul cornered her in that alley with that loaf of bread clutched in her hand.

“Laurel…” He didn’t come any closer. Held his hands up, palms out, as if pleading for something, or fending her off because he didn’t want her anywhere near him again.

Her throat hurt like she’d been screaming. Stooping carefully, she reached for the apples. If nothing else she shouldn’t forget those, and he looked stunned enough to not challenge her on it. Straightening, she somehow found something that passed for dignity. Never mind that moment he’d looked at her with interest, hadn’t he? She only hoped a prissy ice princess like Madge wasn’t his type. “Look, we both know you both were trying to be nice with the whole charity case idea.” And she’d been in that much pain, so desperate, that she’d babbled far too much to Johanna and him both, thinking just maybe Johanna at least might understand some of it. “But it was a stupid idea. I’m not like them,” she gestured back towards the parlor, towards the other kids. “I’m not…”

“Clean?” She closed her eyes and nodded. “Innocent? _Pure_?” She’d swear there was a sharp sarcastic edge to that word in particular. “Sweetheart, you think that bothers me, or Johanna? So I dressed fancier than you before the clothes came off, but I got bought and sold and used for more years than you’ve been _alive_.”

She’d forgotten that he’d been a whore too. Stupid of her. She’d remembered it with Johanna so easily, but with Haymitch she’d let herself focus on only the fact--the threat--of his being a man. Now it made some sense, how he’d stood there and took it, neither flinching away nor eagerly reaching for her. How he’d carefully put her away in a way that safely kept distance, but didn’t aggressively reject her. “Was that…” She gestured, spreading her hands, trying to fish for the words.

Somehow, he understood. He reached up, rubbing the back of his neck, looking away from her in something she’d probably call embarrassment. She’d swear there was a tinge of red in his cheeks. “That was...old instincts acting up. I had my persona for the patrons.” He glanced her way, sidelong, as if making sure she wouldn’t flinch at it. “I imagine you had yours too.” She didn’t answer him. Apparently that was answer enough. “For you to get that smooth, there were more than a couple of Peacekeepers and one local boy, yeah?” 

She felt caught again, like an animal twisting in a trap while he stared at it. She’d blurted that, thinking somehow it made it sound better, made her sound more sympathetic. Just a poor girl in hard times, not an actual whore. Not someone who’d helped make it happen to her, who’d encouraged him. “Sweetheart,” he said the word with a tired sigh, “if you’re thinking I’ll judge, I don’t give a shit if there were three or three hundred. But it maybe makes a difference to how much it eats you up--and how. So, when did it start?”

“If we’re trading stories, you tell me first,” she fired back. Surprised to hear him laugh, but not meanly, more of a weary amusement that sounded a lot more genuine than the cynical humor he’d faked.

He leaned back against the pantry, arms crossed over his chest in a more relaxed way, but that wary, awkward air didn’t quite leave him. “I was seventeen. First year as a victor. Got hired as guest of honor for a Capitol girl’s fourteenth birthday party.” A small, bitter smile crossed his lips. “Turned out I was Mommy’s gift to herself, after she put the girls to bed. She was my first,” and from something in his tone and the self-conscious glance he gave her, Laurel understood that to mean not just the first person to buy him, but his first, period, “but far from the last. The last--well, that was the daughter. Gloriana only wanted me a couple times. Then I wasn’t all shiny and new. But Jubilation was happy to take over once she hit nineteen and got her trust fund. Even her getting married for a couple years didn’t stop it. More than happy to keep right on buying for the next thirteen years. Not my only patron, but the most prominent. Pretty much till I got too old and drunk and fat and she finally crawled out of the romantic delusion.” He shrugged dismissively, as if it didn’t matter. Liar--of course it did. He tipped his head towards her, the silent invitation: _And you?_

“Paul,” she said, trying to not glance around as if it would summon his ghost somehow. She could almost see him standing there anyway, blond and dark-eyed and handsome. “Polonius. I...never knew his last name.” She hadn’t wanted to know it. “He caught me stealing a loaf of bread from Lam’s Bakery. Said nobody needed to know if...”

“Ah. ‘Nobody needs to know about the apples’?” She nodded, not looking at him, trying to not think about that alleyway, the splinter driven in her right knee as she knelt on the sidewalk boards. The memory of the humiliation and bitter shame--how she’d had no idea how much worse that would get once he’d made her follow him back to his quarters. _It’s damn cold and I’d rather enjoy the rest of the evening with some leisure._ “He kept coming back, I assume?”

She nodded, grateful that somehow he could puzzle it out. “I eventually figured out how to get ahead of him. Make him need me, rather than giving in whenever he threatened to arrest me for that stupid loaf of bread.” He didn’t look at her like she was a speck of shit on his shoe. She breathed out in a slow sigh. “There wasn’t anyone else.” Paul would have flipped his lid if she’d gone with anyone else, and she couldn’t risk it. Far safer, and far easier, to go seduce him again when she got too hungry and desperate. “I said that to you both because I thought it sounded better.”

The smile and laugh he gave at that surprised her. “Sweetheart, I’m hardly gonna fault someone who can spin a lie under pressure to try and survive. Nice talent to have. After the 74th, I swear I had so many lies spinning it was a chore to keep track of them all. But.” He paused, and she looked up, chancing meeting his eyes. “You’re not being threatened here. We’re not gonna kick you out. So you don’t need to lie just for the hell of it. You get in the habit of lying too much, you need someone you can be honest with all the more. OK?” Likely he meant it to sound reassuring and warm, but there was that slight stiff edge that told her he wasn’t comfortable saying things so openly--or at least, maybe not to an older girl like her. Probably different with a tiny kid like Lindy. Strangely, his discomfort with it made it seem all the more genuine. 

“OK.”

He paused, looked like he struggled with something, and the flicker of steely rage in his eyes told her what it was. The answering fear rose within her, but she realized it wasn’t aimed at her. “Is he still here in Seven, this Paul?” There was something low and dangerous in his voice. He sounded like he wanted to kill Paul, and there was a part of her that thrilled at the idea, even as it confused her. Nobody had ever cared before what happened. 

She shook her head. “He’s dead.”

“Sure?”

She glanced away from that searching, too-intelligent gaze. “I k--” Her voice broke. She made herself say it. “I...killed him. Out in the woods.”

“While you were escaping, huh?”

That little smile of Paul’s, the crinkle of his eyes from it. _Look, I don’t like how we left it. Don’t you see? It’s not like you could have expected I’d marry you. The Corps, it’s gonna be a better life than just another unwanted mouth at the community home. You can barely feed yourself there. I can’t let my kid starve._

His child, his pride and joy, never hers. The baby was the only thing she’d ever had that she could call hers. Someone that would belong to her, someone who needed her, who might even love her. And when she’d gone to him, because she had nobody else, he wanted to send the kid away to Two virtually as soon as it was born. _Ah, c’mon, Paul, I’m just trying to find somewhere quiet to take a pee for the fifth time today._ Glancing at him flirtatiously, thinking desperately. _Though if we’ve got a few minutes…_

 _Yeah, sure. They’ve been slipping away for days now. You’re going to, what, run off into the woods with those rebels? Don’t you dare. That’s my child you’ve got there._ Hand on her wrist, grabbing, yanking, hurting, dragging her back and actually reaching for his handcuffs, and like that, what hold she might have had over him by keeping him happy was lost, and he’d take her back to camp, and take her body and take her kid and take her pride, and take and take and take and there was already nothing left of her, and something finally broke inside. 

_Let go!_ Obsidian-dark eyes staring up at her, blood soaking that pale blond hair and turning it an unsettling dark red, spreading over the mossy carpet of the forest floor. Dropping the blood-spattered rock and running, wiping her hands hastily on a handful of leaves she’d grabbed because she couldn’t wipe them on her coat. When she threw up five minutes later, stumbling to her knees beside an ancient oak, she wasn’t sure whether it was because of the baby or the dead man.

“Yeah,” she muttered, half expecting to still see Paul’s blood on her hands when she looked down at them. Maybe that was why her son died, some kind of punishment for killing his father. She couldn’t have given her little boy any kind of life, but the raw grief in her at losing him, especially after she’d practically died trying to bring him into the world, felt like it couldn’t ever stop bleeding.

“Ain’t saying you’re stuck here if you don’t want to stay. But I think this is the right place for you.” Another of those little grumbling sounds of discomfort. “And I get it. I’m a guy. Probably easier for you to talk to the women. But my ma, Petra, Johanna--they want to help. Even Madge knows a thing or two about dealing with killing. And Peeta--”

She must have shown something at the mention of his name. “Did he take a pass at you or something?” Haymitch said, searching her face very carefully. “Thought he was in a better place, but the all right, some basic similarity there to Katniss…” 

“She’d have had her kid right about now too. He knocked her up even when he _knew_ for sure she was heading into the arena and it was dangerous. And now there he is making moony eyes at Madge.”

Haymitch sighed, face in his hands for a second, looking like he needed to buck up his courage to say something. “There wasn’t a kid. They weren’t married either. It was a story we cooked up to try to throw the Games at the last moment. Didn’t work, obviously.” He smiled sadly, eyes lowered in thought. “Appreciate it if you don’t spread that fact around, mind. She’s already dead.” Was he insane to trust her with something like that? “No need to tar her name in the bargain. As for Peeta, don’t know if he did something to piss you off--or does he look like--”

“Not really.” Blond and stocky, yes, but not similar enough to actively unsettle her. “It was more thinking he was that careless with her.”

“He’s a good kid. So was she.”

“Did he even love her or was that all a story too?” She demanded it before she could even think better.

“They were in love, yeah. And he’s still getting over her. But either you learn to move forward or you end up caught up in the past forever.” She had the sense he wasn’t talking only about Peeta and Katniss by any means. “I swear nobody’s going to touch you unless you want it. Ah,” he stirred, obviously uncomfortable, “nobody’s going to expect any kind of sex from you. Not at all. Any boy in Seven gives you _any_ kind of shit like that, they’ll answer for it. But--I mean, anything. Even a hug, you don’t want it, you say so. I’ll warn you, the littles--Posy and Lindy, they’re both huggers. Their way of dealing with things after their folks died. We’ll have to work with them about boundaries.” 

She wanted to believe him that somehow this place could be hers and she could belong and it could get better. That she could trust him, or even Peeta, the ones she had most reason to watch warily. That Johanna did care, that they wanted her here. But it was like an ill-fitting coat. It sat too heavily on her shoulders, making her always aware of it. It wasn’t comfortable. 

But she’d give them a chance. It was either that or go back to the community home. She nodded slowly. “They’re next door,” he said. “Having some time without the menfolk around. Probably having some cookies or the like--” He nodded towards the apples still clutched in her hands. “If you’re hungry, just get something to eat,” he said, voice strangely gentle. “We all know you’re healing up and you need a good feeding besides. There’s need to sneak food. But I imagine they’ve got something better to eat than those.”

Carefully, trying to keep her hands from shaking, she stacked the apples again in the bowl, grateful that she didn’t sense him coming closer and trying to help. She had to know, and couldn’t look at him while she asked. Staring at the dull red of the apple skins, she asked, “Is he--did you take care of--”

“You were recovering, so we handled the funeral. He’s buried proper, with Johanna’s kin. We saw to it.” She clenched her jaw at that, eyes squeezed shut, trying to keep the tears bottled up. That said a lot, even as it hurt to think of him there, beneath the ground, and they’d laid claim to him so casually too, tried to take him away from her. “The nameplate, though…”

“Don’t wanna talk about that now,” she managed in a strangled voice, turning and pushing past him. He let her go, standing aside to give her the space to pass, and she hurried for the front door, feeling like she couldn’t breathe. Once she was outside, she looked towards the Memorial Grove. _Axel._ She couldn’t tell these people the name she’d picked, months and months ago out there in the woods. For right now, she still needed Axel to be hers alone. But she could say his name, and so much more, in the privacy of her mind.

It was Johanna who found her on the porch, still staring out towards the Grove and lost in her thoughts, and who led her over to the house next door to warm up with some tea.

~~~~~~~~~~

By the time Laurel settled in with Petra and Magnolia in the kitchen, both women fussing carefully over her in that understated way Johanna felt like she’d never learn, she glanced at the clock and almost panicked. “Fuck,” she said, already hurrying for the door, not liking leaving it but trusting that the poor kid was in far better hands than hers. Haymitch had headed over half an hour ago to have some quiet time to think things over before this conference, and she should have done so too. As was, she’d have to hurry to get ready.

Hurrying upstairs, she unbuttoned her flannel shirt as she went, and by the time she hit the bathroom, she had a soft green sweater half on. “Must be my lucky day, getting an extra show,” Haymitch drawled as she tugged it down over her midriff.

If she’d had two extra minutes she probably would have pulled off the sweater again, undone her bra, and tossed it at him. Just to tease, and enjoying how different it was from the times she’d have done it to fuck with someone. No time for that, though. She barely had time to brush out her hair, flyaway with static now from the sweater, and tend to some basic makeup. For Thirteen she wouldn’t bother, but since they were talking to the Capitol, best to do a few touches. “This is a serious undertaking, Haymitch,” she chirped instead in a Capitol accent.

He eyed her carefully. “Take it easy. If you were wearing about two pounds more makeup, I’d swear I’d married Effie Trinket.” She felt the sudden undercurrent of unease emanating from him. Jokes were like that sometimes--they could fall flat, or cut deep, when pulled out at the wrong moment. Looked like her attempt to cut the tension backfired. 

“Sorry.” Both of them obviously were strung tight right now with everything at stake with the conference, and Laurel was on her mind too.

“It’s all right.”

He turned his head, peering at his reflection. Pausing searching through her cosmetics, she pointed to a small patch of dark stubble on the edge of his jaw. “You missed a little bit, left side.” 

“Thanks.” He grabbed the cake of shaving soap.

“Laurel’s gonna need time.” No better way to put it.

He didn’t question her, whipping up some more of the soap into a lather. “I reckon so.” The way he said it made her wonder what he’d noticed, or perceived. But the girl’s wariness was obvious, and her suspicion and near incomprehension at ordinary things.

“Bad as we had it--maybe we can help her with the sex thing, and just stability or whatever. But at least we grew up loved. She never even had that.”

“No,” he said, eyeing himself in the mirror and daubing the soap on. “Even Katniss had folks that loved her, for the longest time. Laurel’s like her, though.” He said it without the deep, dark pain that would have been there last year, the pain she’d heard there in both his words and the refusal to talk about it. “Busy surviving so long she’s backed off fron the world and ready to bite any hand because she doesn’t know how to deal with kindness. You and me, we did the same with losing everyone and the shit they put us through. But she’s never known any different.” He didn’t say that Laurel was what Katniss could have been. She could hear it anyway.

“So maybe Peeta and Madge might do best there.” Peeta’s fucked-up family certainly hadn’t loved him--the abusive mother, the father who didn’t give enough of a shit to protect him--and even Madge’s family sounded coolly loveless. “They’re around her age too.”

“Madge, maybe. I don’t think she’s ready to deal with Peeta yet. Teenage boy and all, plus the idea that a year ago he supposedly had a pregnant teenaged wife and now he’s falling for Madge, that went over like a tunnel collapse.” His eyes met hers as she finished daubing on green eyeshadow with a light hand. Wearing Seven’s color there so openly oddly reassured her. “We ended up having a little chat about that. I think she’s not ready to murder him, but that’ll take time too.”

She wouldn’t ask what else they might have discussed. He’d tell her in time, but like her, he could lock it down for the time being. “All right. We’ll compare notes after this.”

She smeared the tube of lipstick over her lips and looked at herself in the mirror, seeing the old same bright crimson they’d given her to wear, the vicious axe killer persona they’d forced on her. Blood red--no, she’d made it into Phoenix red. The eyes looking back at her weren’t the fierce and angry ones that stared back at her reflection for all those years.

But they could be again for today, she could be that Johanna of the red lips and hard eyes and intimidating air, and remind the Capitol who they were dealing with here. They’d taught her so well the lesson that so much depended upon pure theatrics and presentation.

“Blast from the past,” she quipped to Haymitch, watching him take another stroke with the razor, the last of the dark stubble finally shaved away.

“Thinking more about the future myself,” he answered her, and wasn’t that typical Haymitch, already running his mind down a dozen different paths and charting every possible outcome. Though what he said next surprised her: “So, hoping you’d be inclined to marry me?”

“We got married already--twice,” and she turned to look at him, not sure what was going on in his mind. Bone-deep practical as he was, it seemed a sudden streak of romanticism. Though even now, he seemed thoughtful, even solemn about it, rather than giddy.

“We got married for the kids once, and for Plutarch’s propo once,” he ticked off two fingers. “Purely for show, both times, and by everyone else’s rites but the ones that really matter. Look, this little chat ends the war or else we’re heading into even worse battles than last year. Either way, everything changes. So I wouldn’t mind having it on our terms rather than theirs.” He made a face, wry apologetic smile and spreading his hands in a shrug. “That’s assuming you want it that way, granted. I’ll always be your friend, you know that. I’ll help you raise the kids either way. Be your lover if that’s what you want, for however long, since we’re about the best for each other in dealing with all the sex stuff. But marrying, that’s...it’s not real right now, it’s window dressing. If we do that, I want that to be a choice you made.” 

She wanted to stare at him in surprise, but he’d take that as shock. “Peeta’s turning you into a hopeless romantic, isn’t he?” A glib quip wasn’t the best response to him laying it out that vulnerably, but it bought her time to better wrap her mind around it all.

“Hey, this is an improvement over our usual--we’re not either dying, in the hospital, or too depressed to lie about how fucked up we are.” He looked at her in the mirror, hands lightly coming to rest on her shoulders. “Doing our best to move forward, aren’t we? Even when it’s terrifying.” 

“Yeah.” She reached up and put her hand over his, turning to him. It wasn’t like she would have imagined as a child, but it surprised her that he’d done it. She’d figured they’d move along, feeling thoroughly married already. But to choose it this time--to have their family all there while they did it up right, by his rites and hers--it felt right. Either way, war or peace, they’d be together. The unspoken words were there too: asking her if she was ready to move forward, take him as a husband in every way. They’d moved towards it, but that final step was a big one. The thrill of desire ran through her, but the fear twined right alongside it. She loved him, but that might not be enough to overcome all the darkness and the barriers when they finally tried. “It’ll never go away, will it? Not entirely.”

He understood what she meant: the hesitations, the mental scars, the doubt and self-loathing and the waking in the night in terror. “No. But it doesn’t have to for this to be more than worth having.” 

She kissed him then, lightly. “Then...yes.” She wanted to linger on that, but reality seeped back in. “Well, shit, at least you didn’t wait and propose to me on the feed,” she said, teasing him lightly.

“Nah. I wouldn’t. This is ours,” he answered, giving her that slight smile. 

She gestured towards his lips, now smudged with red thanks to her lipstick, and chuckled. “Better clean that up or they’ll think we’ve been up to all sorts of naughty things.” She glanced back in the mirror, and decided the lipstick would do fine. Heading downstairs, she grabbed her coat, hearing Haymitch behind her, feeling oddly at peace considering what they were facing. 

They’d chosen the Justice Building as the best place for their end of the conference, and Cressida and her flunkies flew in from Thirteen for it, including Effie Trinket, who fussed over Johanna’s camera angles. She couldn’t sit at Mayor Luoma’s desk, as it would feel too creepy, plus the great seal of Seven behind the desk wouldn’t be the right touch. Wearing a touch of green eyeshadow was one thing, but she had to remind herself again that she was supposed to be something bigger than a single district. In some ways this winter it was too easy to slip back into it, like an old coat that suddenly fit again. So they’d rigged up a conference room that Luoma presumably used when Capitol busybodies visited to check on Seven industry, and hung a Phoenix rebellion banner on the wall, the red of it a bright flare against the deep walnut paneling. Haymitch sat down beside her, tossing a notepad and pen onto the table, ready as ever.

Cressida eyed her, stepping aside and gesturing towards the teleconference camera, and the projection of it onto the wall behind, a jury-rigged white sheet used as a screen. “Feed live in four...three...two...one.” Johanna glanced there long enough to see Cressida step back, and Effie’s hand surreptitiously slip into hers. Good idea. She found herself reaching for Haymitch’s hand under the table, holding on tight.

She saw Coin’s iron-featured face first, and then a few seconds later, on the right hand split of the screen, the face of a Capitol woman, with red hair that couldn’t be in any way natural. “And whom am I--are we--addressing?” Coin said in her brisk, clipped accent.

“I am Artemesia Corday,” she said. “I suppose I’ve been put forward to speak for the people of the Capitol in these negotiations.”

“Any particular reason they tapped you?” Corday wasn’t a face Johanna recognized as a mover and shaker in the Capitol, either in politics or celebrity. She glanced over at Haymitch. He shrugged slightly. Obviously he didn’t know her, and she hadn’t bought him.

“Because I killed Coriolanus Snow,” Corday said coolly. “I recruited some of his guards to our faction and then I killed him in his bathroom while his guard was down.”

Assuming she told the truth, that answered one question. The ruckus in the Capitol over the last few days meant that information about the assassin was confusing as hell, conflicting reports coming in almost by the hour. “Any reason you did that?” Haymitch ventured carefully. Corday’s eyes flicked over to him.

“To help end the violence, put a stop to this terrible civil war. He wouldn’t quit until we’re all dead. I killed one man to save thousands. So that more...reasonable voices could be heard.” Her eyes darted over to the other side of the screen. Johanna noticed then the makeup hiding the hollowness of her cheeks, and how it wasn’t the fashionable leanness Capitolites strove for, but the sunken look of hunger. “Do we really need to negotiate in her presence, Miss Ma--uh--Mrs. Aber--Phoenix?”

“District Thirteen has been an integral part of the rebel alliance,” Coin replied. Coin certainly made it clear that inclusion at the table was an expectation, and given how Thirteen helped get the rebellion off the ground, Johanna could hardly tell her to go piss up a rope and fall in line. Besides, she figured it kept Coin pacified, and having someone else help negotiate this thing gave it some more legitimacy. She didn’t want the weight of Panem’s future falling solely on her shoulders. Although at the same time she wished Coin would go away, feeling her hovering there like a dark and menacing cloud over the whole thing.

Corday let out a small sigh. “Very well. The most important point first: the Capitol is prepared to offer an armistice, with recognition of the areas held by your soldiers as a free and independent nation.”

That shocked Johanna--the Capitol, willing to give up anything? But as she chewed the idea over more, she realized what it didn’t contain. The areas still held by the Capitol weren’t mentioned. “And what about the areas still under Capitol control?” she ventured. “Parts of One and Two, Three, Five, Six, Eight, and Twelve?” She didn’t dare look over at Haymitch right then, but she heard him scribbling on his notepad. He shoved it over to her and she glanced down, seeing the bold black scrawl there, the last word in capital letters and underlined twice: _May use Twelve as a freebie, figuring you’ll bite on my behalf? DON’T._

“There’s no reason for us to give up areas that still remain part of the nation of Panem.”

“You’re hardly in negotiating position,” Coin pointed out. “Given all the food-producing districts are under our control already.”

“And all the technology and medicine are under our control,” Corday shot back. “We each have something the other wants.”

“The Games?” Johanna said. 

“Pardon?”

“Would you continue the Games? The tesserae? The production quotas?”

“That’s...that hasn’t been addressed as yet by the provisional government.”

“It seems you can’t speak with much authority, Ms. Corday,” Coin pointed out. 

“We’ll cede District Twelve to your authority,” Corday said, eyes flickering nervously towards Haymitch, and Johanna had the sense of a desperate last-ditch effort from it. “Possibly District Eight as well.”

She waited half a beat for Haymitch to speak but realized he didn’t intend to, unless it was necessary. He was watching and listening and taking it all in. She shoved the notepad back towards him, giving him a surreptitious “OK” sign below the camera line. “You’ll give us the tiniest, poorest district in Panem. One that’s already cut off from you by our territories, one that has coal production you never really needed, the place you’re holding as--what? Some kind of symbolic gesture? Katniss Everdeen’s been dead eight months now and the rebellion happened anyway. The people forgot her. Don’t act like you’re doing anyone a favor with that offer. Do yourselves a favor and march your Peacekeepers right out of Twelve. It’s a fucking albatross to you.” It wasn’t untrue, but it was harsh, as harsh as the old Johanna had been, and she had to steel herself a bit to say the words and mock something that still held meaning to a man she loved. But if his will was tough enough to not let them use Twelve to jerk him around, she wouldn’t make light of that by knuckling under either. “Not good enough. The Capitol surrenders, offers its deepest apologies for the Games and all the suffering we’ve endured, and submits those people the new republic--” Republic of _what_? Never mind, it didn’t matter. “Republic names as suspected of--” Here her words failed her--she wasn’t good at this legalistic bullshit. Plain speech was her stock in trade. She wanted the ringleaders, the ones who’d made the Capitol turn. It hadn’t been only Snow that held the whole sick system together.

It was actually Coin that saved her. “Suspected of crimes against the people.”

“That’ll do,” Johanna muttered, then spoke up again. “All the districts are considered independent of Capitol control and all Peacekeepers will clear out.” 

Corday shook her head, a twitch of something like despair coming over her features before they smoothed out. “There’s no way we can accept those terms.”

She couldn’t write off those still in the districts in Capitol hands. It wasn’t just Twelve. It was Three, and Five, and all the rest of them. They deserved to be free too, not abandoned because it was convenient and because the other districts of Panem got what they wanted. The burden fell unequally. The Career districts suffered barely at all compared to the likes of Seven or Eleven or Twelve, but did it matter? They’d all been born slaves without choice, all of then watched children die in the arena for no reason other than the whims of unfeeling Capitol masters. If they let half the nation go, accepted crumbs from the table, it would never change. Chances were it’d get even worse in the Capitol-controlled districts. It would mean more fighting, more blood, more sacrifices from people fighting for a district that wasn’t theirs. But she’d seen them fighting like that already, for the idea of freedom, independence, choice. Ten and Nine and Thirteen and Seven, side by side, all united in a single cause. They could keep going. “Then we’ll keep fighting you until every last man, woman, and child in all twelve districts in Panem is free. Because they deserve nothing less. Tell that to your government.” 

“Then I believe this negotiation is over.” With that, Corday’s screen clicked to black. 

Coin glanced at her. “I believe there’s now strategy to talk, so I’ll get back to it. If there’s a role for you in the upcoming fighting, we’ll be in touch.” Staring at the silent, black screen, as the fierce rush of certainty and pride and anger faded, she leaned forward, head propped in her hands. Effie and Cressida tried to congratulate her on a great sound bite to release to the people, but it didn’t feel right.

“I did the right thing, didn’t I?” Had she thrown away the best chance to end the bloodshed by dealing with someone smart and brave enough to take out Snow? Maybe she should have listened more, argued more, tried to get Corday and her people to come around to better terms. She’d mentored. That meant accepting getting less than desired, being willing to accept a half-result of one life sacrificed and one saved, at best. Should she have agreed to abandon half the districts to assure what half they had would stand safe? Taken it as a start, hoping that maybe in the future, a mellower Capitol might ease off on the remaining districts?

“No easy answer on this one,” he said quietly. She felt his hand on her shoulder, squeezing lightly. They’d agreed to get married not an hour ago, but no time to bask in that. Somehow it meant more that he was here now, sensing what she needed, than if they’d been off sharing some candlelit dinner. “But yes, I’d say so. This isn’t the arena, Hanna, and they were offering us peace on Hunger Games terms.”

She nodded at that, feeling more confident, if not exactly getting over the sober realization of the mayhem to come. Haymitch had alluded to it more than once with remarks about how tough it would be to take the larger towns and populations of the western districts. “Then that’s our war from here on in. Last year was all about capturing what we could and scraping the fighters together to do it from wherever we could get them. But we still think of ourselves as Seven or Nine or whatever. From here on in, it’s got to be better organized. We’ve got to unite. Stand or fall not as twelve--thirteen--districts, but one nation.”

Tomorrow they’d have to think about the war, and probably try to get a jump on the fight before the Capitol could react. As she turned to him, taking his hand in hers and giving herself the luxury of a moment of feeling supported and loved, she heard Cressida murmur, “We _really_ need to get her to say those last lines for the camera.”


	47. Chapter 47

Given they’d already gotten married--twice--presumably there was no novelty left to the idea, even if they’d bothered to let Plutarch and his team know. Besides, it wouldn’t be nearly as fancy as the one they’d done for the cameras back in Thirteen, so there was nothing they’d want to film. But nor would it be as sterile as Thirteen’s drab paper-signing and compartment assignment. It helped that here in Seven a wedding was understood as a family affair, something quiet and private.

“It’s a little different in Twelve,” Peeta explained, carefully slicing a still-steaming loaf of bread studded with fruit and nuts, wrapping the slices in a blue-checked napkin. Seven’s lucky color--obviously he’d picked up on that, even as he brought Twelve’s apparent tradition with the bread into play. “Big wedding shindigs on summer nights--at least, down in the Seam. We merchies were more...uh...decorous, I guess you could say.” From his tone she heard the _boring_ he preferred to say, but didn’t. He laid down the knife and picked up the bread, juggling it to get another fold of fabric between his fingers and palm and the bread. “I’ll take this to Haymitch, huh?”

“Yeah, well, most weddings here are in lousy weather when we’re here at the winter town, so--no big outdoor to-do. Friends drop by in the weeks after, visiting and all. Bringing gifts. And newlyweds get their dances in at the harvest festival each fall.” Usually a few were reserved for the couples married in the last year, and the toasts flowed freely to each couple. 

It wouldn’t be like that for her and Haymitch, of course. Most Seven couples tied the knot in fall or winter, about as quickly as they could get a new housing assignment approved at the Justice Building. This late into the home season at the winter town, any couple would have barely any time with privacy, and a real bed, before getting kicked out to the lumber camps. She and Haymitch might not be bound to the lumber camps, but they were heading back to war, and that was more or less the same result. 

Peeta headed out towards the parlor, carefully clutching his napkin-wrapped bundle to his chest. She spared a thought to wonder if today stung him at all, dreaming of Katniss still and the Twelve wedding he’d lied about having in a way that made her certain he’d fantasized about it. But she didn’t get the sense of a murky, painful reality underlying that smiling, cheerful face like she had before. Whatever ghosts whispered in his ear, he’d learned to keep them at bay.

Her mom came in then, grumbling to herself, throwing up her hands in that frustrated gesture Johanna reluctantly had to admit she’d inherited. “Am I done being banished yet?” she said dryly as Petra refilled her cider glass. Normally it would be spruce beer at a Seven wedding for the adults, but they’d all quietly acknowledged Haymitch’s sobriety by going with the cider instead. Nobody had made a big deal--good for them, because she’d have chewed their asses if they made him feel lousy about it. “I mean, shit, it’s not like any of you have let me lift a finger to help cook today.” She smirked, taking a sip from her own glass. “Or Haymitch, and you know what a whiz kid he is at chopping the veggies.” He’d taken his share of jokes about his prodigious knife skills, but she could tell whatever enjoyment he’d had about cooking before he took to drinking all his meals had crept back. It had for her too, now that it wasn’t all about the lonely guilt and disproportionate effort of preparing a meal for one.

Petra let out a chuffing laugh at that, but Johanna got the sense of nervousness from her that she’d missed from Peeta. “Mom?” she said, putting the glass down. “What is it?” Fuck--was it her mom? Her dad? Sick? Cancer? “Who’s sick? Are they dying?” she demanded, not sure she could take it, not after getting them back such a short while ago. Even Haymitch had worried about his dad earlier in the winter, much as he’d been loathe to admit it before the two of them apparently finally hashed out their differences.

Petra’s hazel-brown eyes opened wide in astonishment. “Everybody’s fine, sweetie,” she said, shaking her head, and leaning back against the counter as if to brace herself. “I just...wanted to talk to you about…ah, sex?”

Now it coalesced into a complete picture, and if it hadn’t been so uncomfortable, she’d have started laughing uncontrollably. “Mom, seriously. No problem. You already knew Holly’s mom gave us both the sex talk back when I was eleven.” Poor Holly, executed up on that stage. She still couldn’t pass the Justice Building without the occasional shudder, never mind that the months of rain and snow had scoured those old boards clean long since. “And I’m not exactly ignorant,” she quipped, trying to make light of it rather than get incredulous. “You never really wanted to talk about it when I was a kid, so,” she shrugged, “why now?”

“I didn’t want to talk about it then,” Petra said, words oddly stiff, fingers nervously ruffling and knotting a dishcloth she’d plucked off the counter, “but I should have. You’re too much like me. I didn’t want to tell you about Birch and all of it.” A sad smile pulled at the corners of her mouth. “We pissed each other off too much in those years. I didn’t want to look...even worse to you. And you were so awkward around the boys at that age, so I let myself be a coward about it.”

“Mom,” she said, shaking her head, something twisting painfully in her heart, understanding now that the shame had followed Petra all those years, that lived there still in some ways. “What happened in the Capitol--nothing you could have told me would have helped that.” That hadn’t been a horny, selfish teenage boy cajoling and manipulating and then finally forcing. Nothing could have prepared her for it. Haymitch’s cool honesty and diffidence hadn’t. 

“Maybe not. And maybe that shrink’s done you more good than anything I’ve got.” Petra chewed her bottom lip for a moment, putting the tortured, wrinkled dishrag back on the counter. “Your father, he’s a good man.”

“Yeah?”

“Gunnar was patient when I needed it. Let me say when and how and all of it. He’s the only reason it turned away from being a nightmare. But sometimes, even with all the kindness--when you’ve been mauled by a forest cat, sometimes there are moments when even the cat you live with and pet and love suddenly reeks of the wild, and you swear you see those ivory and green stripes.” She shook her head. “Shit. Clunky metaphor isn’t helpful. What I mean is...much as you love him, much as he loves you, you’ll have moments when it all comes back to you, and you can’t see the man you love through the memory until you come back to reality. And he’ll likely have ‘em too, given what he’s been through.”

“Yeah.” Monosyllabic seemed to be all she could manage at the moment, but she couldn’t tell her mom about it. They’d already run into that more than once. The memory of Haymitch on the bed, facedown and waiting in silent terror, intruded the sharpest. It was too personal, too private between them. “I know,” she offered, not willing to give details. “We’re...we’re working on it.” She shoved that memory aside, reaching instead for the memory of him looking at her, eyes wide and bright with desire, trusting her as she touched him, body tensed only with the slow build of pleasure.

“It’ll still happen sometimes. But less and less. But,” and her voice turned sharp as a saw blade again, “doesn’t matter how much you love him. Or how much you think you need to make yourself get through it. You can always say ‘no’ to him. Doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done whatever.”

She didn’t want to admit it, but that was a good piece of advice. To that point, it was all Aurelius’ exercises. It hit her with a pang to realize they’d never really flat-out said “no” to this point. Or at least, it hadn’t happened since Haymitch turned her down all those years ago, though even then, he’d made her understand it, but he’d deftly woven his words around it and never outright said “no”, had he? They’d had the word beaten and scared out of them. “Not yet”, all the way back to the CPC and since, and “wait a minute” if they needed a quick break and a deep breath before pressing on with Roarke’s latest assignment, determined not to fail. She hadn’t even thought beyond that, to a right for saying “no” even after saying “yes” once, a dozen times, a hundred times. The power to outright refuse was still absurdly abstract. “He can say ‘no’ too,” she pointed out, trying to cover her thoughts. And she’d have to respect that, and not take it as a rejection. She hadn’t to this point, but then, she’d always assumed it as a call for a few minutes of breathing room, not a sharp cut-off.

“Sure,” Petra answered. “Sweetie--” Now her smile softened, turned into something easier and comfortable. She reached out and tucked a lock of Johanna’s hair behind her ear, like she’d used to do all those years ago. “You’ve always gone after what you want, and damn the hardship. You’re like me in that. Just don’t let your willpower do away with your wisdom, right? You and me, we go too hard without thinking, we hurt ourselves, or others.”

It felt odd to talk so openly about it, given how wary the two of them were around each other all those years ago. But Petra was right: they were too similar. “Last thing I want to do is hurt him,” she muttered, unable to look her mother in the face as she said it. “Enough people have.” She had too, even as he’d hurt her in turn.

“No, but I think you’ll push him sometimes when he’s caught up in his own head and he’s stuck. And he’s a cooler head when you need it.” Shrewd assessment, Johanna had to admit. 

“Not exactly the man you imagined me marrying?” She couldn’t resist baiting her mom a little--force of habit. It was a foregone conclusion. Haymitch being from Twelve would have ruled him out anyway, long before the fact of him being a bit older and formerly drunk came into play.

Dryly, Petra answered, “Well, I told you before, it’s not as though you need my approval. But you’ve got it, for what it’s worth.” She cleared her throat again. “Nola and me got to talking--we’ll take the kids for the next three or four days. Phin expects some kind of report from Coin by that point with where things go from here.” 

“Huh?” 

“You’ve been mostly busy raising kids and fighting a war ever since you two tied the knot. And you’ll be back in the war zone soon enough. You two need a little time to yourselves before that. What you do in that time is up to you two, but much as you love your kids, you two have enough to deal with already without worrying about Posy and Lindy barging in or anything else.” Petra’s tone made it clear there would be no argument. “We’ll leave your meals on the porch.”

“But…Mom, c’mon...” Why was she arguing about this, anyway? Much as she loved the kids, a few days of peace and quiet--what did it spark? Fear? Guilt? Some weird mixture of both?

“And feel free to tell Haymitch that if he tries to ask about the intel, Phin’s just going to tell him to go spend time with his wife.” Petra raised an eyebrow. “Priorities, kids. Make some time for each other, without the shrink giving you the excuse for once. Or District Thirteen scheduling it.”

“Yeah, OK, Mom,” she mumbled, sensing the heat of a rising blush, and feeling like she was fifteen all over again. 

Before she could look up again, she felt her mother’s arms folding around her, holding her tight. “Be happy, Hanna,” Petra told her, barely above a whisper. “You deserve it, and anyway...that’s the best way to spit in the eye of anyone who hurt you. You’re stronger than they imagined.”  
She nodded, the lump in her throat keeping the words locked inside, but it didn’t need to be said. With a last pat on the shoulder, Petra let her go. Johanna didn’t look back, because if she did, she had the curious feeling she might start sniveling and blubbering, but instead headed toward the parlor. 

Posy intercepted her in the hallway, orange rucksack on her back, tackling Johanna in a hug. “Mom,” she said happily, showing off a grin with a gap where she’d lost her first tooth last week, “we’re gonna all go to the grands’ house?” She patted Johanna’s vest and skirt, the same ones she’d worn for Plutarch’s propo wedding in Thirteen. “Ooh, the pretty skirt!” She squinted thoughtfully. “But now you’re happy.”

Translating the disjoint train of thought of a six-year-old came easier now. Yeah, the last time she’d worn this, the smiles were forced ones for the camera. Funny how a little kid could be that perceptive. “Yeah,” she agreed, reaching down to pick Posy up and hug her tight for a moment. “I’m happy, so you go be happy and have fun at the grands’ house.”

“Yeah. But I gotta learn Lindy she can’t get all the cookies Grandma Nola makes just ‘cause she wants ‘em.” She smiled in spite of herself, hearing Posy’s total belief at the idea of justice and fairness. There might actually be a world about to dawn that wouldn’t crush that faith, where a kid as bright as Posy could grow up to become something more than another drudge slaving for the Capitol, or worse yet, arena fodder. Her breath caught--no, she wouldn’t even let herself imagine that terror. She had enough horrors already that woke her up still in the blackest hours of the night. How the fuck had her parents withstood it? 

“It’s ‘teach’ Lindy about sharing cookies, hon. And yeah, that’s a good thing for her to know.” She put Posy back down, watching her scamper towards a waiting Gunnar out on the porch.

It felt a little odd to have to step outside to cross the threshold of a house that had been hers for years now, in the spirit of a ritual that was aimed at a couple’s first steps into their new home, but she wouldn’t argue. Although she caught a glimpse of Haymitch staring in surprise as she stepped outside and the first notes began--it wasn’t just the kids and their parents out there. Chaff, Cecelia, Georgette, Taffeta, Cedrus and Matthias, Blight and Clover, Chantilly and Niello, and all the rest: all the people of the Glade, the victors and their loved ones, showed up for this. Dammit. Her eyes stung a bit at that. Or maybe it was their singing, most of them clearly unfamiliar with the Twelve song--probably learned it only a few hours ago--and more than a few of them off-key. Peeta was the worst, virtually tone deaf, but she found herself smiling at it anyway, unable to help the feeling swelling in her heart. They’d put up with her by virtue of her surviving the arena, and she hadn’t exactly ingratiated herself to them, not the way Haymitch had. But right then, she felt like they all belonged, woven into a single web, strong and sure. Like in that moment everything was secure and right with the world, despite everything that had happened. 

Some good-natured ribald suggestions followed, with the two of them standing inside the door, looking out at the crowd on the porch as they filtered away, ready to leave her and Haymitch to the rest of it. ”Don’t be forgettin’ to let the old fart sleep after you tucker him out, Johanna,” Chaff said softly, white teeth showing stark against his deep black skin, in a delighted grin, clapping Haymitch on the shoulder with his one good hand.

“Fuck you, Chaff,” Haymitch and Johanna said it simultaneously, under their breath, all of them cognizant of the little kids still nearby, but the victors had their good-natured insults, kids or no, and Chaff chuckled at the nearly ritual response. Haymitch punctuated that with an exaggerated wave goodbye and shut the door.

“They’re _your_ friends, honey,” she said with a smirk.

He scoffed comfortably, tripping the locks on the door and stepping back. “Yours too, darlin’. You just didn’t want to accept it for a good long while.”

The fire lit easily--Nola must have gotten a few pieces of coal somewhere for the mingled wood and coal fire. Seven lit the first fire like Twelve did; seemed like it could hardly be otherwise in the other district producing a combustible heat source. But the bread, that was all Twelve, and strange as it was, it felt right to do it for him. It meant something to him, even if she fucking hated raisins.

“Whoever made the raisins a traditional ingredient in toasting bread needed to be dumped down a mine shaft,” he muttered, and she snickered in delight at the shared disdain. Then he sighed, settling down on the rug from where he’d been kneeling. “Ah, poor little rich victor me. Easy to forget that even raisins were a treat when I was a kid.” _And still are to everyone else,_ she understood.

“I know Peeta loves ‘em.” She squinted at the remnants of the toasting loaf, licking her fingertips to get the last of the butter and spice and sticky fruit off them. “I seriously think he put extra raisins in just to show that he cares.” Weirdly sweet of him, even if a little off-target.

“It’s such a jumble of bits of everything in that bread that you’ll probably hit one thing that everyone hates.” Given she figured there were a good half-dozen dried fruits and several kinds of nuts, she suspected some Twelve baker had literally emptied out whatever leftovers they’d had into the mixing bowl one day and called it good. He gave her a sarcastic grin, reaching out to prod the fire with the poker. “Figuring out how to swallow the occasional sour bite along with the sweet--well, ain’t that a good lesson for marriage?”

She didn’t let herself take it as an insult or an attack on her, even as it was still her immediate instinct, and so was the urge to lash out in return. “Think we’ve been through that one already.”

“And how,” he agreed. His lips relaxed into something less wry, warmer and more genuine. “Johanna…”

Suddenly she realized just how quiet the house was without the kids there, without anything else needing their attention. A flicker of panic went through her, followed by the stupid thought that she probably should have shaved her legs for this. But he’d seen her buck naked with leg fuzz to boot often enough these last few weeks and not made any comment about it. Then again, different thing entirely for him to touch her like that, compared to having those legs wrapped around him. Everyone he’d been with before..all those fucking plucked and starved and perfumed _Capitol_ women and men. The ones he’d never wanted, and this was the Capitol’s crazy beauty standards invading her brain, wrapping her in shame over something so ridiculous.

“You don’t give a shit I didn’t shave my legs for this, do you?” It came out almost as a challenge, and if he said he’d prefer it, she might well tell him to fuck off and sleep in another room tonight, even if it was the Capitol’s fault. “Or my crotch, for that matter?”

His eyebrows rose, eyes wide in startled confusion and then narrowing in comprehension. “Ah...no?” He gave an uncomfortable sounding laugh. “If you don’t mind that I didn’t?”

She stared at him, fighting the unsettled feeling in her stomach. “This is…” It all had turned weird in her head. She could touch him, so long as there was a goal, some specific thing Roarke told them to try and accomplish. Backrubs or letting him bring her off, that was fine, that was oddly safe for knowing where to go and how and exactly what to expect. But this was something different entirely. 

Stumbling blind, trying to stitch together all the scraps of what they’d worked on and somehow make it happen. She wished in that moment she’d simply fucked him in a hurry long ago, because she didn’t know what to think or how to be right now. Touching him, being touched, hugged, kissed, sleeping curled up against him, was different. She’d never bothered too much with foreplay with any of them, if she could help it, and she’d never actually slept with them. But moving on from that--the feel of a cock inside her, the heat and sweat of another body against hers, couldn’t be that different just because it was him. Too many memories, and it haunted her now to wonder if it would be different _enough_ now that she had actual hopes and hungers for it, or if despite her mom’s assurances, the past held too much of a grip still. 

Besides, well-meaning as their parents had been, they’d more or less shut the two of them away with a implied firm command to get to the sex. The echoes of expectations, orders, hung there, like the smoke even now curling up into the chimney, fragrant woodsmoke and the sharper edge of coal. They’d had Thirteen and their CPC sessions, Snow and his Victor Affairs calendar, even Roarke’s gentle, well-meant assignments. Her mom told her she could say “no”, but did she really know how to say “yes” either, rather than acquiesce? She wanted him, that much was clear, but at the same time, the thought of it, and the sudden immediacy of now facing it, scared her shitless. It wasn’t that she feared him. It was that he meant too much and if this was a disaster, if they’d couldn’t bridge that gap, she didn’t know that she could handle losing that comfortable trust between them. 

“This was always going to happen,” he said, voice very quiet, giving an unusually harsh jab to the fire with the poker. “We knew that. Right from that hospital bed. Maybe even from the day they first locked us up together in that CPC and we were jumpy as hell because neither of us could write it off right there. Even then I think I knew if it was ever going to happen with anyone, it was going to be you, because I could trust you. I mean...we can’t keep circling it, putting it off forever?”

 _You’re killing me with the romance._ No, not those words either. She could go upstairs with him this minute, and face it. But right now, the trepidation stood stronger than the desire, and the idea of making it into something to endure and get over with, gave her a sick feeling. “It’s no good right this minute, though.”

He inclined his head slightly in acknowledgment of that, and nodded to the chessboard. “Play a game?” he suggested. “I’d say go for a walk, clear our heads a bit, but if we bolt out of here like a shot less than twenty minutes after they left us…”

“Yeah, at best, we get a lot of bad jokes about you.”

“Thanks,” he said dryly, gaze level and inscrutable.

Her temper flared up. “Fucking hell, I’m not saying you’re lousy!” She added defensively, “I mean, you seemed fine that day…got the job done and all...um.” Not that her naive perspective then understood much, or filed it away for comparison later. 

He rubbed his brow with his fingertips, eyes squeezing shut, giving a low mutter of impatience. “Can we not go there, please? That day’s something neither of us wants to dwell on. Don’t think it has much of a place in the here and now with you and me either.”

Even as she realized that was for the best that he turned it aside almost softly, she half wished he’d fight her. Though she had to admit that was only because fighting was safer. “It doesn’t.”

“Anyway, the folks get the sense we’re still hesitating, we get a lot more well-meaning advice and sympathy. I’m a bit old to take that with good humor.” He shook his head, hitching up to his knees again. “Only you and I can fix this, in the end. Roarke or our folks or Chaff trying to give me some mellowgrass can only do so much. We’ve got to shut the door on them eventually and handle it ourselves.” 

“Wait, what? Mellowgrass?”

He rolled his eyes, fishing in his pocket and tossing her a twisted cone of plain white paper that she unrolled to find a few tightly-rolled green cigarettes in it. “Chaff’s helpful suggestion was to hand me that and say that you and I never relax, so he suggested the good ol’ ‘Eleven herbal remedy’.”

“Hey, he might be onto something there,” she joked flippantly, remembering the dreamy calm of a few puffs on a mellowgrass cigarette in one shitty Capitol bar or another. She usually ended those nights without fucking someone, because the anger and fear and the need to control and punish smoothed out.

“Yeah, and I could also down a few shots to the same effect,” he lashed out, with a razor-sharp edge to his voice. “I’d rather not have to get tipsy to sleep with you.” There had been too many of them that he’d ended up drinking in order to endure it. She remembered that all too well, and there had been too many of them for her in an alcoholic haze.

She held her hands up to show she wasn’t going to fight him either, that she’d meant no offense. “Hey. Stupid joke. That’s all.” He was right, though. She’d meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but she didn’t want this to be something she had to get half out of her mind to make happen. She put the mellowgrass aside, after debating chucking it into the fire and rejecting that idea. The last thing they needed was the whole parlor to reek of it. She jerked a thumb towards the chessboard. “So, game?”

Sitting on a pillow in front of the low table, it was easy to calm down. Spending time with him was never hard, and now this was just like any other day. Moving her castle ahead, she plucked up his pawn and put it aside. 

He studied the board, cheek resting on his palm. When he spoke, she had the sense it was to get them both back on more comfortable turf. “Laurel’s gonna do all right, but she’ll need time,” he said gruffly, moving his bishop. “Probably gonna be looking at us as an example.”

She tried to not feel pressure at the idea of a teenage girl looking to her to show that it was all right, that it could be good again after abuse and violation and shame. “Looks like she trusts you.” The poisonous thread of jealousy attempted to worm its way in. He’d said very little about it, but he’d somehow gotten Laurel to confide in him just like _that_. 

“Wouldn’t say that.” He shook his head, a tired look on his face. “I’m a man, so I scared her shitless, and it got her babbling, that’s all. I’d rather it didn’t happen that way.” He eyed her with that careful, distant look of his. “You trust me?”

“Of course.” Instinctively she wanted to add the sharp _idiot_ to the end of that, but bit it back. She still plunked down her pawn with a bit more force than it needed.

“Then there’s nothing about it that I’m not telling, guilty or the like. She’s ashamed right now and it’s delicate. She’ll talk to you soon enough, quicker than she’ll come back to me.”

The urge was there to press him, demand answers, but she curbed it. She could use what they had and make him submit, but she’d lose some of his respect in the bargain. Trust didn’t come easily, or patience, but it was worth it. “Is there anything I should know?”

He answered her quickly, without hesitation, and something in her eased to hear that he wasn’t holding back, calculating what was right to say. He’d wanted to tell her. “There was one who worked her over pretty hard. Peacekeeper. He's dead, though.”

“Shit. Then we’d better be ready for her to eye your dad sideways for a while.”

He let out a chuff of amusement. “Dad’s a tough old buzzard. He’ll manage. Not like I didn’t do the same to him for years.” _Even six months ago when you were half ready to kill him,_ but she didn’t say it. Whatever passed between the two of them when Phin got sick, it cleared the frosty tension. Maybe they’d never be warm and fuzzy, but they could be kind. She wondered if Haymitch, or Phineas, even noticed how much brighter Magnolia seemed now that two people she loved so deeply weren’t at odds any longer. “I did lie to her a bit.”

“Ah?” Funny that he seemed to need to confess that.

He shoved his castle forward and captured her knight, not looking up at her as he deftly snagged the little white horse and set it down by his side of the board. “I told her about the circuit. Thought maybe she needed to hear it so she’d see I’m no threat to her. But I said Jubie Frill was the last one. Not Thalius Eland.”

It took her a moment to place the cryptic reference, but she’d seen the scars on his back too recently to not figure it out in a hurry. “Don’t think that was a bad call. She didn’t need to hear about that. Not when you’re trying to convince her that it won’t always be a nightmare.” Easier for him to spin a tale of an ageing whore finally rejected and ignored--sad and numbing, but nothing so terrible as Snow’s cruelty of selling him off to a butcher like Eland as a final punishment and to drive home Haymitch’s lack of value.

“Mmm.” It was that low sound he made to acknowledge something, even as he turned it over in his mind. Not that thrum of discontentment he had, though. She looked over at him sitting there, pondering far more than the game board, eyes absently turned towards the chess pieces but gaze far more distant than that. There was a flicker of something as she let herself live in that moment--the low thrill of the way the light caught his features, the glint of it on that glossy ink-black hair. The desire came back, a slow seeping tide. It didn’t overpower the nerves and the trepidation, but it was there.

She tried to use that as support, because it was easier now that they talked, and he’d told her about the last time, but she’d never returned the favor. “I don’t even know the name of the last one,” she confessed, trying to avoid feeling the burn of shame at it even now. “It was some guy I picked up at a club back in 73. Lots of alcohol, chased it down with a pill or two. That was the first night. After we’d been down at the morgue,” she explained. 

“Not like I’m in a position to judge that. I went upstairs and drank myself unconscious that night. It was a bad one for both of us,” he acknowledged. Worse than usual: all four of their tributes died quickly and brutally less than twenty minutes in. Something in her broke at even the stupidest flicker of hope being snuffed out that decisively. She’d had the uneasy feeling that this was the beginning of the end, that all she had ahead of her was a long dark road like Haymitch’s, trying harder and harder to numb the pain. And then she’d thought, _Why not?_ Why keep fighting it and getting beaten down more and more? She’d yelled to Blight that she was going out, knowing he’d be with Clover that night and hating him a little for having someone.

The disjoint images came back to her: the dreamy blur of neon lights and the burn of the overpriced brightly colored drinks, then an apartment, all chrome and black paint and sharp angles, the electric blue tufts of hair falling over his face, bold black tattoos even on his groin, and she couldn’t even remember his features. A high-pitched giggle, a suddenly crowded bed, another hand on her from behind, a hand with skin with a sheen like frosted gold. “So..apparently a guy and maybe there was a girl too? I don’t…it’s all...” She shook her head. She hadn’t thought about it since that next morning with a splitting headache and feeling shaken that she’d given up. She’d focused more on her anger and her determination, letting herself forget them. They hadn’t mattered. All that mattered was that they’d listened to her and handed over the reins and it felt good for a little while, that she could make someone pay for it all even slightly. They’d been nothing more than tools to use and discard.

Her throat went tight at that. She tried to not let Roarke see how he made her sweat, get upset in a way that wasn’t about the reassuring defense of anger. He hadn’t asked her the details of the last time, but there it was now, and Snow and his cronies might have degraded her, but in the end, she’d done it to herself. Starting with Spark and Gloss and running right in a row to Tattooed-dick and Glitter-skin, she’d reveled in her ability to tell everyone to fuck off by fucking, and she’d only chased her own ruin anyway, much as she’d dreaded becoming like Haymitch. So she and Haymitch had come far, but that claim on her soul was still there. “I’m tired of it. Having nothing except memories I want to forget.” She dared then to look up at him, lurching into a feeling of greater confidence now in what she had to say. “Aren’t you tired of it too? Does it really matter if we screw it up somehow, when the bar’s _that_ fucking low for both of us?” 

Looking right at him, she could almost hear him thinking up some glib defensive quip like, _Can’t resist a seduction like that,_ but he didn’t say it. She went in for the kill, because if she stopped, if she hesitated, she might lose her nerve again. If he told her “no” she’d listen, but she couldn’t wait for him to make the move. He’d been caught up the system so much longer, and he was the one who had to analyze everything fifty different ways. So she’d make the push for both of them, and see where it led. “Aren’t you tired of us having only once that we both want to forget? That we keep coming back to anyway because that’s all we’ve got? I want to leave it behind for good.” She heard the uncertain edge in her voice, watching him for signs of temper or that cold defense wall he had, but maybe it was better that he hear that anxiety, something genuine, rather than her having thrown it out there in a smooth purr. There he was again, always thinking, and the urge to fill the silence became too much. “Look...c’mon. It’s gotta be better than that day was. Even if it’s a total fucking disaster--”

“No pun intended?” he interrupted her, but gently. 

The joke helped jolt her out of the anxious babbling, and she allowed herself a huff that was mingled exasperation and laughter, reluctantly smiling and picking up one of the pawns to lightly toss it at him, hitting him right in the middle of his chest near where his tie disappeared into his vest. “Yeah, OK.”

He picked up the piece, turning it over idly in his fingers for a moment, and then put it back on the table. “Yeah, OK.” 

“Are you repeating me or what? If I want an echo I’d have married Templesmith so I could always have a camera on me for playback. Or maybe Cressida, these days.”

His bark of laughter met that, and she saw something easing in his expression. “I think Effie would fight you for Cressida,” he told her lightly.

“Eh, I could still take her. Especially now that Thirteen made her cut those nails.” She cocked her head aside. “Now, I would have thought last year I’d have had to fight her for you.” The Twelve escort had practically been hanging on him at points.

“Nah. Effie liked that I was suddenly a shining star again and she wasn’t an embarrassment for being teamed with me,” he answered bluntly. “That was all. She only wanted the fantasy. Not drunk and bitter old me. Still kept me dreading the idea on the Victory Tour that I’d wake some night to find her sneaking in to start our little romance.” He pushed up off the pillow, hitching up to his knees. “You’re right. I’m tired of it.”

“Yes?” But she wasn’t asking him to repeat himself. “I mean…that’s a _yes_ yes?”

He hesitated for a moment, then reached a hand out to her across the chessboard. She looked at it, seeing the glint of light off the gold band of his wedding ring, the small nicks and scars, the calluses of the last months of war and labor. Not the hand of the Capitol’s pet victor, and neither was hers. She looked up to his face, seeing him watch her carefully. Even now, there was that careful look, as if he couldn’t let everything he felt show. “Yes.” He drew in a quick breath and added, “And if we don’t get it right...that’s not the end. We’ll try again, that’s all.” Something in his eyes softened as he said it.

A greater sense of calm settled over her with that, enough to keep her going. She reached out and took his hand, pulling herself up, but not letting go after that, even as she carefully closed up the fireplace, as she led him upstairs. He shut the bedroom door behind them as she glanced at the bed, freshly made up with clean sheets. She turned back to him, free right hand resting on his shoulder as she moved in to kiss him.

It wasn’t a blazing, demanding kiss fit to start ripping clothes off, or shoving him up against the door. But that was all right. He was so much more to her than a fuck, and so it could be something deeper and richer, not relying solely on the explosion of lust. How long the kiss went on, she couldn’t say, but it felt good, holding close and gently banking up the embers into heat. Not comfortable, exactly, as the hunger and the restlessness increased, but it was that good kind of tension, anticipation and longing rather than fear.

Still kissing him, she found herself running on instinct, fingers sliding over from where she’d gripped his shoulder to blindly tug at the knot of his tie. He broke away from her then, stepping back, and she felt the loss of it, sharp and almost painful, and the caustic feel of shame started to burn. She should be understanding, patient, but it caught her like a slap in the face with as vulnerable as she felt right then too. He’d said _yes_ , and now he had the right to say _no_ , but she couldn’t follow it, couldn’t figure him out. “Then what do you want?” The angry, humiliated words slipped out before she could help it, building a safe defense against the dark monster of anxiety that hovered right there. “I’m not a fucking mindreader, Hay!” Yeah, Roarke was going to love this. Get the two of them off script and they couldn’t move beyond a simple make-out. 

At least he didn’t go retreating back behind that icy wall of his, but she didn’t look up then, not even at the touch of his fingers on hers, trying to gather herself together again. “Not this time, that’s all I mean. The clothes, we each handle our own, OK?”

Clawing her way back to reason, she had to admit he had a point. Turnabout was fair, and as she tried to imagine standing there and letting him undress her, it was a step too far, frightening rather than sensual. Such a small bit of control retained, but it was one she wasn’t ready to give up yet, and obviously he wasn’t either. 

“All right, that’s fair.” She reached up, meaning to shove the vest from her shoulders, shrug it off, and heard him laugh.

“You’re always in such a damn hurry.” Looking up, she saw that cheeky half-smile. “Wait a second and observe, mm?” Giving him an impatient sigh and making sure he heard it, she watched as he undid the knot of the red-and-blue tie, pulling it loose from around his neck. He dropped it casually on the chair, and looked at her, eyebrows raised, humor in his eyes.

She got the idea quickly, and almost laughed herself. But if he wanted a game, she’d damn well turn it into one. She crossed her arms over her chest. “You’ve still got a vest, so you’re one up on me,” she complained. “You go again.”

“Enjoying the show that much already? Damn,” he shot back, smile widening. “Besides, we’re actually even. You’ve got a bra that I don’t.”

“Hey, I wear it better than you could.”

“Not arguing that point. It’ll look even better on that chair, though.” He gestured her on with an extravagant sweep of his arm. “So?”

She kicked off her shoes in response instead, nudging them towards the chair. “Your turn,” she said sweetly. Oh, this was good. He’d found the right way to make it hit that sweet spot, tugging at that competitive edge they both possessed, turning it into a game of sorts. He answered her with his own shoes. “Well, that’s unoriginal.” She shrugged the vest off next, tossing it towards the chair.

She got his socks in return. He gave her one of those sharp-edged smirks and said, “That different enough?”

Shit. She couldn’t peel off her own stockings now without conceding that round to him, but she grinned back at him as she reached back and pulled the wooden comb from her hair, letting it fall loose down around her shoulders. “So I actually had an extra. Whoops.”

He rolled his eyes, but shrugged, reaching up and undoing his vest, putting it aside. Higher stakes now, and her fingers moved a bit slower as she undid the buttons on her blouse one by one, feeling him watching her. Her resolve hung in the balance for a moment, but she got a grip on it. Whatever happened only happened on her terms, and that had happened in those later years in the Capitol too, but it was bigger than her now. He was an equal part of it rather than a simple instrument. But maybe everything she’d done in the past wasn’t entirely horrible. There had been power in it of a blunt and vicious sort, but power all the same. She wouldn’t order, wouldn’t make him beg, but she took her sweet time with the last buttons, sensing his interest sharpening, and hiding a grin of victory at that.

Should have figured he’d give as good as he got, and he turned the tables by quickly whipping through the buttons of his shirt, giving her little time to savor the sight of it. Now she couldn’t hide the grin, recognizing that he’d pushed right back in his own way. She allowed herself the time to look at him standing there without his shirt, but it wasn’t fear that raised goosebumps. March, even late March, in a house this far north without heating, wasn’t anything close to balmy. They’d run into that problem more than once during their assignments from Roarke, and the weather today was especially frosty. Reaching behind her to undo the clasp, then using her hands to hold the bra in place for a moment, wishing ridiculously she’d worn something nicer than plain white cotton, she lifted her chin and met his eyes. “Still thinking this would look better on the chair?” 

“Undoubtedly.”

She couldn’t resist giving him a scowl of warning. “You make any dumbass jokes about it being cold in here…”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he drawled, sarcasm given that fond edge she loved, because now it drew her in and made her a part of it rather than shutting her out. Dropping her hands, peeling the bra away, she watched him. He looked at her, but at least his eyes didn’t fixate on her chest. Nothing he hadn’t seen before, after all, and touched and kissed. Though the air was definitely cooler, and he was as good as his word, not making any wisecracks about her nipples responding to it. “Yep, it does look better on the chair.”

“Trousers.” She crooked a finger at him. “Your turn.”

“Now, I’d argue the belt should count as separate, really…but it ain’t July here.” Now both of them were in a bit of a hurry, chill air on increasing amounts of bare skin, and if he was momentarily graceless in getting the trousers off, that was oddly touching. He could have made it smooth if he was acting, but this was real. By the time they hit the floor she already reached for the zipper of her skirt, and it fell around her ankles in a soft woolen heap, stepping out of it. 

He was down to his undershorts now, and much fun as it was to try to put one over on each other, she didn’t really want to make him feel the extra vulnerability of standing there buck naked while she still had something on. “I’ll spot you these to make up for the belt, how’s that?” She peeled off the stockings, and they joined the messy heap now overflowing the chair.

Pausing then, she looked at him. It was his turn, but somehow it didn’t seem right. Her eyes rose from glancing at the undershorts, past the scars from Finnick’s shots, to his face, his eyes. 

He must have known what she was thinking. “Together, then?” She nodded in reply, and kept watching his eyes, even as she shoved her underwear down and kicked it off. He didn’t disappoint her, eyes not roving downward even for a moment. Somehow that made a curiously vulnerable moment something private, even warm. The spell held for a few moments, neither of them looking away. “All right, I’m freezing my ass off,” he grumbled, and both of them dived for the bed, and she turned the covers back in a hurry, shivering already as she did so. Burrowing in under the blue wool blanket from her parents and the quilt from Magnolia, he flipped them back over the two of them, both of them shivering.

Hesitating for a heartbeat or two, she crowded closer to him, feeling the heat radiating from him all the clearer without both of them having pajamas between them. He reached out, arm wrapping around her waist, drawing her in tighter. Pulled in together as they were, chest to chest, she couldn’t resist a chuckle at a sudden bump against her leg. “Skip the ‘or are you happy to see me’ joke, eh?” he muttered, teeth chattering. She buried her laugh in the crook of his neck, shivering away.

It took a while, but finally the covers and the body heat helped. Her attention gradually turned away from clinging for simple animal warmth to the nearness of him, the press of his body against hers, skin on skin, the soft rasp of chest hair. His hand on her back, moving back and forth every so often as if to chafe more warmth back into her skin, now felt more like a caress. So when he leaned in to kiss her again, it came as no surprise, and she met him in it immediately.

Their back-and-forth with the clothes helped, showed them the start of the path. This was different, so much better than being either the patient or the observer, either entirely helpless or at some remove from the pleasure. This caught both of them up in it, so even as her hand swept down his back, his cupped her breast. Trying her best to not think too much and end up paralyzed by it, drawing on instincts and impressions of what he’d enjoyed, the covers soon became a mess, flung away by the two of them moving. But it was all right, she was warm enough now, especially when his mouth replaced his hand which slid down her body, delving in between her thighs. Her hand went down in answer, gripping around his cock to return the favor and stroking the way she’d learned he liked, but he raised his head. “I don’t need much help there right now. Women take longer,” he said, a note of rough urgency entering his voice that sent a thrill through her that she felt right down to where his fingers teased her. “Just...let me?”

It felt oddly greedy now to lie there and let him touch her, offering nothing in return, but it felt so good, and she let herself enjoy it, less awkward than it had been on this same bed even a few days ago with him fully dressed. Her fingers twined in his hair as he kissed her breasts, and that was why she felt him pulling away, sliding down her body, kissing his way down her belly, ducking under the covers. A faint shiver of near-panic sizzled through her. This was somewhere they hadn’t gone yet, and the thought of it left her feeling too open, too vulnerable. She tightened her fingers, tugging lightly to get his attention as she tried to find her tongue again. His head popped back up from under the blanket, hair a rumpled mess, his eyes on her face, steady and watchful. “Not yet,” she told him.

His brow furrowed, but she saw it was his usual look of concentration and thoughtfulness at puzzling something out, not the creases of temper. She had the notion that every time she saw him sitting there staring at some war intel or whatever with that look on his face, she’d be imagining him like this now--pleasant thought. “Is that ‘Not yet’ as in you need five more minutes of other stuff first, or not today?”

“Not today,” she clarified, trying to not kick herself for the vagueness. “Maybe not for a while. I mean, are you up for it, me doing you like that?” She made a few vague gestures to indicate _my mouth, your cock_. Somehow the words felt too strange right now, when it couldn’t be a quip or a coarse defense.

“Not quite.” He stared at her, as if trying to measure whether that answer pissed her off or not. 

She nodded, satisfied. With that bump out of the way, she decided to take the initiative again. “I’m ready enough anyway.” Although that presented its own question, and she decided quickly enough that maybe fell into the “maybe in five minutes” category, but she’d as soon not risk the freak-out until she saw how this went at first. “You mind me being on top?” 

“By all means.” He reached up, twitched a pillow under his head better, rolling onto his back. She tugged the covers up again as she moved over him, straddling his hips. 

Though she realized the power he’d given her, and felt compelled to return the favor. She paused for a moment, hand around his cock and feeling the tip of it pressing in against her, moved to look him in the eyes and ask him one more time, “Yes?” Admittedly it was as much to make sure he was really here with her even now, as to make herself that distinct from all the people who’d taken it for granted that he had no power to refuse. Besides, she’d admit to herself that she wanted to hear it. It wasn’t selfish to want to hear that he wanted her, was it? Arousal didn’t necessarily mean anything. 

A look of surprise crossed his face, and something shone in those grey eyes as they locked with hers. “Yes.” That, more than anything, got to her, and she kept looking in those eyes, pressing herself down on him.

She paused then, resting against him, letting herself live in that moment, overwhelmed but in the best possible way. _So that’s how you feel_. She didn’t realize she’d said it aloud until she heard his low chuckle. “Been thinking about it, mm?”

“Like you haven’t.”

His fingers touched her cheek in a gentle caress, and her breath hitched in a way that didn’t have to do with the physical sensation of it all. “Sure. But it’s real, though.”

Something in her felt cracked open, some part of her she suspected she’d never be able to gather up again safely and hide away unscathed. She’d given it to him, and she could only trust that he’d cherish it. But he’d given her the same in return, and it scared her even as it felt right in a way sex never had been. At the end of this, it didn’t matter who was on top and who came or any of it, because there was no need to keep score. She wouldn’t be there in the aftermath feeling diminished.

So she gave herself over to that private world they created between them, sensation and feeling both, the touch of his hands and the look in his eyes, the sound of his voice murmuring things to her that she’d never heard him say before, and what she said to him, nobody but the two of them would ever know. There would be no pay-to-view camera crew, no surveillance cameras or microphones, nobody to answer to for it.

She tucked up against his side after, half-sprawled across him and not wanting to let go, his arm around her telling her he didn’t either. His hand reached for hers, holding on for dear life. Neither of them said anything for the longest time, because for once, there was no joke to make, nothing that wouldn’t belittle it. And if she’d seen what looked like a shine in his eyes through her own suddenly blurred vision, and if she left the crook of his neck a bit damp where her face rested, and felt it against her own brow from him, nobody but the two of them would ever know that either.


	48. Chapter 48

Lighting the oven and opening the flues to let the stovetop heat up, Haymitch blew the match out and tossed it in the mug of water by the sink to thoroughly drown before getting thrown out. He’d had a state-of-the-art kitchen courtesy of the Capitol for all those years, but old childhood ways came back easily enough with convenience stripped away. Slowly the heat radiated into the kitchen through the cast iron, seeping through the robe he’d thrown on over his sleep t-shirt and trousers, though he imagined the floor was still chilly beneath the layers of house-moccasins and socks. Spring was coming, but compared to Twelve, Seven made a slow job of it, winter fading away like a lingering mist. Or maybe, he thought wryly, it meant he was just getting older, though everyone else bundled up every bit as much.

Their folks had left lunch and dinner the past two days, but they hadn’t left breakfast--he smiled sheepishly realizing that with the wisdom of long-married folks recalling their own sleepless honeymoon nights, they probably figured that with no rigid work schedule to keep, there was no telling how late he and Johanna might stay up or sleep in. That was all right, given the kitchen had a good supply of staples, and it was short work to get some bacon and eggs from the cooling box outside, and grab bread and coffee from the pantry. His stomach growled in concert with the first sizzle as he laid the bacon into the old cast-iron skillet. Johanna’s wasn’t quite as well-seasoned as his ma’s had been, he noted even now, unable to resist a slight trace of smug Twelve pride. But cast iron care must have been part of mountain folk culture back before the Fall, because even the poorest Seam families had their lovingly maintained ironware. The one still back in his kitchen in Twelve was like a dark mirror, butter smooth. It was one thing he’d put away long ago, unable to keep using it, with too many memories of his ma at the stove, and meals that might have been meager, but well-cooked all the same. 

Shoving the bacon to the side of the pan to continue, he tipped the eggs into the grease, hearing the creak behind him of that loose floor joist near the entrance from the hallway. His heart skipped a beat, and for a moment he had to forcibly tamp down the urge to grab the knife--it was a serrated bread knife, but it would do--and wheel around, ready to attack or defend. “Mmm, heart attack skillet?” Johanna’s voice carried the thick, froggy note of still waking up. But she’d announced herself, knowing better than to sneak up on him.

He let out his held breath and let the tension go, relaxing. “I figure we worked off our share of calories since dinner.” He was near forty-two now and even if he’d had an eighteen-year-old’s near endless energy, he’d damn near be worn out after the last two days. He couldn’t help but grin at it anyway. 

Scraping the eggs up again and folding them back on themselves, he felt her hand on his shoulder first, testing him, waiting and hesitating to see his reaction. No startle or frozen tension, so she sighed, leaning in against him, wrapping her arms around him. “Morning,” she mumbled into his back. He did almost startle then, not from alarm but surprise. She couldn’t have known about that silly dream of his, the one Aurelius pestered him about because he’d insisted not all Haymitch’s dreams could be nightmares. Warmth behind him from her, warmth ahead of him from the stove, but it was more than physical sensation that made him feel at ease. Maybe this was what happy felt like? He wasn’t as young--or as thin--as he was in that dream, and beneath the terrycloth and t-shirt his wounds still felt a bit stiff and aching in the cold. But he didn’t need to worry that if he turned, she’d vanish because she couldn’t be real. If he turned, he’d see Johanna, all too real.

So he turned, slipping his arms around her too, feeling how easily they fit now into this embrace. No need to look at her face, familiar to him now as his own. “Morning,” he answered, and if his own voice rasped, it wasn’t all from the last vestiges of sleepiness. She couldn’t know, but he couldn’t explain it to her right now. Later--in those still and vulnerable moments after making love, safe within the lingering armor of the intimacy, when it felt like anything could be said--he could tell her then, if she asked. 

“Fire’s lit.” They’d eat their breakfast out in the warmth of the parlor, by the fireplace. They could eat and do the dishes, maybe play a bit of chess or read a little, but eventually she’d look at him, or he’d look at her, and that connection between them would suddenly give a jolt. Back upstairs with them when that happened, hurrying to dive in between the covers as the clothes came off. “Want me to get the coffee?”

“Thanks,” he answered her, reluctant to let her go, even for the sake of letting her get to the coffee, or his preventing the eggs from burning. But he was enough his ma’s child that the thought of waste made him cringe so he let go, turning back to the pan and catching the meal just in time.

He had the thought of all those babies he’d seen when he was a kid, oddly distressed when they couldn’t see something that had been there, convinced it was gone, and marveling when it reappeared like that was some kind of fantastic magic rather than simply being out of sight for a time. “Object permanence” was the posh term Beetee had used to explain it when talking about a dull-witted Eight tribute.

_Object permanence._ Snow taught him nothing lasted, nothing was safe, nothing couldn’t be taken away. Made him shocked when people stayed, when good things came back again. He breathed in slowly, surprised to find the faint sense of panic wasn’t there. This wasn’t his dream and he wasn’t that lonely, desperate man. Johanna would be there when he turned around again, and she’d be there in an hour or so up in their bed, and she’d wake up next to him tomorrow, and next week. “We both know you’re less likely to threaten to punch someone if you get your coffee.”

“Clever boy. We both know you’re actually witty once you’ve had your coffee.” He heard her at the sink, running water into the kettle to boil it. 

“Ouch. C’mon, the brain’s not at its best, you know I’ve barely slept these past couple nights.”

“Oh, you poor lamb,” she said in an over the top breathless feminine coo that belonged far better on Cashmere than her, ducking past him to put the kettle on one of the burners, “have I been keeping you _up aaaaall night?_ ”

How the hell he could want to grab her, lift her onto the counter, and tug open that ratty old faded green terry robe and get his hands on her, just from that suggestive teasing, he didn’t know. It wasn’t the fake glamor-girl voice that did it, it was all her. “Not complaining.” He smirked at her. “Coffee, round-the-clock sex, heart attack skillets--long live freedom from the Capitol _and_ Thirteen.”

She snickered at that, digging in the drawer for the silverware even as he grabbed two plates from the cupboard, sliding portions of the food onto them. A few minutes more for the coffee, and they headed into the parlor. She’d thrown the quilt down again on the floor, because while the warmth radiated out through most of the room, the best of it died out quickly at a short distance from the hearth. Besides, it had felt a little silly sitting in the armchairs, staring at each other while trying to balance plates of food on their laps and clutch cups of coffee to boot.

She plopped down with no grace, sitting cross-legged and balancing her plate on her knee, already reaching for her fork even as she folded her legs in. Sitting down himself, he carefully put his coffee down, tucking into the food with gusto. For the next few minutes, silence more or less reigned as they devoured their breakfasts, no need to fill the space between them with extraneous words.

“So,” he said, putting his plate aside and glancing at her, “what’s our dear Phoenix thinking about where things go next?”

“Uh-uh,” she answered, shaking her head, eyes flashing darkly. “Nope, you’re breaking rule number one of this little honeymoon.”

“And that would be, let me guess, ‘No war talk’?”, hearing the dry tone in his words. He couldn’t say exactly why his mind turned there. Maybe it was the sense of peace right now, eating a quiet breakfast with her, able to think about the days and nights ahead. As usual, something in his brain flashed a neon warning sign that it couldn’t last, that something could take this away. Not Snow or even Coin, but the idyll couldn’t last forever. They had a war to win. _Fucking “object permanence” indeed._ “C’mon, it’s not that I’m bored,” feeling like a stammering schoolboy. Didn’t she understand? This was how it worked for him. He had something to protect now, something he couldn’t bear to lose, so he had to fight for it, and that meant thinking ten steps ahead. The sooner he figured out the next likely steps and how he could help, the sooner the war got won, the sooner he could stop being afraid of losing it all from the next random bullet that might not be so far off the mark as Finnick’s. Sometimes it still haunted him to wonder if Finnick’s aim was off because of his sheer berserker frenzy, or a moving target, or if the part of the Four victor that had been their friend fought back enough against the hijacking to avoid delivering a guaranteed kill shot to the head or heart. He suspected--all right, he wanted desperately to believe--it was the latter, given Finnick’s high qualifying marks on Thirteen’s shooting range.

She looked at him. She’d never been the sort to shyly avert her eyes, even if that gaze was less of a staredown now. “I know that. And I’ll have to be her again soon enough. Probably write some fucking inspiring speech for the kick-off of the Great Panem Civil War, Year Two. But for now...” She moved closer to him, reached out for his hand, fingers knitting with his. She always held on a little too tight, as if she hoped she could keep it all close and safe by not letting go. “I don’t want to lock her away just yet, all right?”

Not the Phoenix, not the Capitol’s creation of “Jo”, not even Victor Johanna Mason of the 66th Games. The woman she could be with those she loved and trusted. He shook his head, and the name rose to his lips easily now. “Hanna.” There was plenty he could say to that, but he had to think of how to put it. 

Something softened in her eyes at the sound of her name, and she leaned in, lips finding his as he tasted the bitter hint of coffee, even the last lingering traces of mint toothpaste--she’d started to become so familiar, and yet it was all still a wonder to him.

“Upstairs?” she said, half-sitting in his lap already. Obviously they weren’t going to make it through doing the dishes first.

“Warm enough here?” he asked in reply, because suddenly the bedroom seemed too damn far away. 

“We’ll manage,” she answered, fingers already tugging impatiently at the belt of his robe. 

He raised an eyebrow, smirked at her, and leaned aside for a second to grab another birch log and throw it on the fire. “Let’s just make sure of that.”

The warmth was no problem, and he soon recognized what a luxury it seemed to be able to see all of her, bundled up beneath the covers as they’d been. True, he’d seen her naked during their therapy assignments from Aurelius back in Thirteen, but it was different to see her at ease stretched out on the quilt, limned with fireglow that made her golden skin seem almost to shine.

He’d always been one to make the most of an opportunity, and it seemed she felt the same because she delayed too rather than just tugging him down to the quilts and getting right to business. Her fingers paused for a moment on the scar on his shoulder. At first the scars had felt like an odd, tricky stumbling block: how to deal with them on a lover? Scars were a wonder to a victor, especially one who’d been to Remake over and over from being on the circuit. Having scars and keeping them, proof that those things had happened and couldn’t simply be erased, felt like a small triumph. Ignoring or avoiding them felt too Capitol. But at the same time, lingering on them, focusing too much on them, felt almost like fetishizing, reducing a person to those mere moments of pain. 

In the end, it was best to accept them as part of the whole. The scars were there, but they didn’t define him, or her. “Really bad today?” she murmured, fingers gently rubbing the shoulder. He’d learned early on there was no point trying to hide the ache from her that sometimes plagued him in this cold weather--she was well aware of it. Some things even advanced medicine couldn’t fully mend.

“Nah, it’ll do.” Something like wood chopping would nag it more, but pushing through aches and pain wasn’t strange to him. 

“Good.” She surprised him them by rolling onto her back, hand still on his shoulder, pulling him down to her, over her. Given how carefully she’d asked him on their wedding night to be on top, and remembering her panic when he’d ended up on top of her during that tackle during Finnick’s attack, he’d expected--well, had he ever thought much about it? Not really; wasn’t like he felt something lacking in sex, or in being a man, by not being on top. But he hadn’t expected her to tackle it headlong and so soon. Though he should have, Johanna being Johanna. 

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask _You sure?_ He repressed that instinct. They’d both asked that before, and it never went well. It read too easily as _I think this is a bad idea and I have doubts about you_. They’d both learned there was a difference between coddling and supporting. Maybe she was truly sure, and asking would be condescending. Most likely, she wasn’t totally sure and she’d run with instinct and a moment of courage, and asking could make her doubt. 

Either way, she’d made the choice to take a go at an old and deep fear. So he went slow and easy settling himself over her, trying to brace himself up and give her as much space as she could so she didn’t feel smothered or pinned.

Her eyes sparked with irritation. “Don’t fucking treat me like I’m made of glass,” she growled, yanking down on his shoulders. He suppressed a wince as her thumb dug into the knot of scar tissue as she did it.

The fear was right there behind the mask of anger. But he thought he read that other fear too--the fear of never getting there, never mending that torn and stained piece of self.

The hard ferocity in her eyes cleared and she moved her thumb, grip easing, the brief flare of pain receding immediately. “Sorry.” She rubbed her thumb across the scar gently now, a clumsy soothing gesture, eyes on his.

“Sorry,” he echoed. “We’re still figuring it all out, yeah? I’d rather go too slow sometimes than too fast. Annoyed is still better than freaked out.” 

She smirked. “Meh, I figured maybe you need me telling you what to do, you poor clueless man. After all, busy as I was, if we do the math I’ve probably got wider experience than you.”

It was pitch-black humor, but strangely, it was exactly the right thing. Being able to make it into a joke and cut it down to size helped. _We’re more than our scars_. He gave a huff of laughter, leaned down to kiss her. “Yes?” That felt like the right question, the only question that mattered.

“Yes.” It was still early days, the part of them left carefully watching, assessing their own feelings at any moment and ready to back off at a sign from the other that it wasn’t all right. Complete abandon to the moment wasn’t in the cards yet, but he had the sense that it could be, that they were moving closer towards it each time. There would come a day where lingering fear wasn’t a part of this every time. And they’d probably encounter rough times when it came to sex now and again for the rest of their lives together, the spark of an old horror catching fire for a moment from some echo that called to that reminder, but that didn’t matter. They could get through them, and past them.

He gave her the best he could, tenderness and care, secretly thrilled as he felt her more and more at ease, holding him tighter, pulling him closer. He slowed down again towards the end, and she rolled her eyes, fingers tapping lightly but impatiently on his shoulder. “Still here, still fine. What, you think I’m terrified of your expression when you come? I’ve _seen_ it. If I’m into it with you, it’s sexy as hell. If I’m not, well, the only scary thing is how hilarious orgasm faces are.”

He couldn’t help but laugh again. “Best do what I can to make sure you’re into it, then. But slow down a bit, otherwise, I might be done first here.”

She gave her own snort of laughter. “What, just because this is the first time you’re on top, I’ve gotta come first or it’s ruined? That’s generous, but trust me, you’ve done just fine before with getting me off first. And you’ve seen you can take care of it after you’re done if not. I’m not letting you off the hook.” Something sobered on her expression. She lifted a hand from his shoulder, touching his face, work-roughened palm against his cheek. Her gaze met his. “I’m not your patron,” she reminded him. “You don’t have some kind of-- _duty_ \--because this is weird for me. We’re not keeping score.” Her lips twitched up into a wry smile. “Trust me, if you’re getting selfish, you’ll hear about it.”

“I know.” He tried to find the words, not the easiest thing given his brain was mostly given over to the furthest thing from rational thought, pure sensation and emotion and the instinctive need for more, closer, faster. “But today--I need it. No duties, no threats. Nothing in this but you and me, for real. I want you to come like a fucking wildfire, and know it’s me that did it.” Even that didn’t fully explain it, all those tangled feelings of how much it would mean to know she’d responded to him, the real him, that he’d never been able to have that moment with a woman he loved, that it would help wipe away some of the grime of all those other women and the fakeness of it. But those words would have to do. 

She understood. He could see it in her expression. She drew in a deep breath, let it out, then raised an eyebrow, moving her hips up against his. “Keep up the talk like that and I’ll be done soon enough.”

He couldn’t resist a bit of a smirk at that. “Promises, promises.” He managed to keep enough sense when he finished to not just fall on her in a graceless heap, but if he’d redoubled his efforts, she’d met him every step of the way, so it felt like he’d barely managed to tiredly lever himself beside her before his eyes slid shut in exhaustion.

He woke to the sound of the fire crackling, and Johanna’s warmth pressed against his back, her arm thrown carelessly over him, and a blanket over them. For a moment, he let himself savor the feeling of being cared for and kept safe by someone he could trust so utterly. Then he rolled over, needing to see her, needing to talk to her.

She’d obviously napped too, because her eyes had the bleary look of waking up as he turned. “Wore you out, didn’t I?” she said with a slow, sleepy laugh and a trace of smugness.

“Looks like I returned the favor.” He reached out and brushed a lock of hair from where it was falling in her eyes, tucking it behind her ear. A small gesture, but the need to continue the intimacy, to touch her even in little ways, clung to him. 

“Hanna,” he said again, trying to find all the stray fragments of thought that he’d been turning over before he abandoned them to live in the moment. Acting on impulse and saying “screw it” to whatever problem he’d been chewing over mentally? That was new. So maybe she was a bad influence on him, or a good one, or maybe some of both. “It’s not all or nothing. You don’t have to...lock this,” he gestured awkwardly at the two of them, “this you, away in a trunk or whatever. This you, the Hanna you are with me, it’s you. So’s the Phoenix. So’s your parents’ daughter Hanna, and being Mom to the kids and all the rest. Even Jo the victor, some of that was bullshit, but some of that’s you too.” It was only fair to acknowledge the dark parts alongside all the rest. Victorhood had cost them, but it had taught and shaped them just the same. 

She sighed, turning on her stomach, propping her chin on crossed arms. “I know.” The words were half-muffled into her arms, but he didn’t chase her, knowing it might be easier to say some of these things while not having to face him. That she could bring it up meant the intimacy was still there anyway. “I have to wonder before Corday finally did the world a favor and got rid of him if Snow ever looked at this war, what we’ve accomplished, and admitted to himself that he screwed up--with you first all those years ago, and then me too.”

“How so?” It seemed like an odd segue, but he wanted to see where she went with it.

“He should have either killed you or left you alone. Look at Finnick.” He could imagine the likely flash of pain in her expression at his name even now, and felt the pang of it himself. “He kept Finn in line that way. He threatened his family, but he let the man go find even more leverage for Snow to use, so he had a woman he loved, a future to protect, people he didn’t want to see hurt. Eventually there would have been kids he’d have to fight even harder to keep Snow happy because of them being legacy tributes. Snow pretty much let Finn and all the rest hang themselves. You, me? He was so afraid of us so he took everything away. Broke us down, but he gave us nothing to lose when the time came.”

There it was--the soft spot she carefully guarded. “And now we both have people to lose.”

“I’m just...”

“Afraid.” Even now she had a hard time saying the word. So did he, admittedly.

“Yeah.” She heaved another deep sigh. “If I don’t put away what I care about, maybe I can’t go back out there and do what needs to be done. Maybe I hesitate at the wrong moment because I don’t take the risk I need, and that’s actually what does me in.”

“Or maybe you fight all the better.” He reached out, putting a hand on her arm. “Last year we fought back for what we’d lost, who we’d lost. We fought angry, yeah?” Broken and bleeding and determined to call in the cost of all the years and all the lives. “This year--we have something--someone--to fight for, something personal.”

“I don’t--it was different in the arena. I was out of my mind for half of it, and I never had a boyfriend, didn’t have kids, my parents had other kids who would have supported them if they made it to old age. Heike and I both knew Bern would probably do it because he was moving up the ladder anyway. I wanted to live, but--nobody truly _needed_ me to survive, not in the way of depending on me.” She lifted her head, looked back over her shoulder at him. “The Second Quell, your mom and your brother needed you to keep getting by, and you had a girlfriend. And then you had Katniss and Peeta. They needed you.”

He answered her unspoken question. ”It’s different. The fear’s greater, but so’s the motivation.” He moved closer, put his arm around her now. “And I need you.” She must know what he meant. Yes, he could survive without her. But his life would be devastated. _You matter,_ he silently willed her to understand. She wasn’t just the Mockingjay’s sudden replacement, the middle child, the romantically unwanted teenage girl. 

“I know.” Her voice was little more than a rough whisper that time. She pushed up off her stomach, rolled to her side to face him. “I need you too.”

The sheer weight of hearing that said out loud, and everything it attached, love and obligation and fear and joy and pain, was almost too much to bear, but it was like the pain of thawing frozen fingers, numbness returning to health. “The kids need you too,” he reminded her, throat tight, as he reached out and gathered her in closer.

She nodded at that. She went silent for a minute or more, the only sound the ticking of the clock. “I need ‘em too.” She tugged at the blanket, restless folding it around their shoulders. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but...I think we need to cut the honeymoon short. This has been…”

“Yeah.” He understood what she meant. Maybe there were no good words for how much the last few days had meant to both of them, how many fears it had burned away, how much he’d regained of himself and even grown to encompass this new intimacy between them. “It has.”

“But I need them too. And we’re going off to war soon. And--you’re right, I don’t want to lock it all up in separate boxes anymore.” 

Now that she said it, it made perfect sense, and the missing piece dropped into place for him too. Alongside the giddy whirl of the new emotional and sexual intimacy, he’d felt that stillness. He’d been a husband, but that other part of him forged at such cost had been laid by the wayside. If they’d been two ordinary people, perhaps four days or more of nothing but blissful constant sex would be enough, but they’d been alone so long, and those other ties meant too much. 

He needed to see all of them, and be a part of the circle they’d forged. He was Johanna’s husband and lover and that newly-shaped facet was an important part of him, but it couldn’t be everything. Plus he was eager to try to get some kind of rhythm of normal life in the short time they had before the war started up again. “No, I get it. I need them too--I’ve missed them. Let’s wash up and head over early, help out with lunch and dinner.” He grinned roguishly at her. “We can still come home for dessert after dinner if we want.” It didn’t all have to be one or the other, and that felt like the big secret to it all. He could be a doting father, a loving son, and then come home and make love with Johanna like a fiend a couple hours later.

She snickered at that, pushing the blanket off. “Get the kettle on and let’s start heating some water.”

Getting dressed later, after a bath, he couldn’t help but turn his mind back to the wider situation. It all went far beyond their little family and even District Seven. “I know you said no war talk, but…” They couldn’t shut it out forever, and he needed to think ahead, to plan, to be ready.

She shrugged her shoulders, combing out her damp hair with slow, even strokes. “No, one of your roles is ‘scheming bastard’. I say it as a compliment, OK. And the war’s coming back. I’ve gotta accept that and be ready.” She put the comb down and twisted her hair back into a functional knot. “And it’s easy for me to say you don’t get to worry about the war. We’ve lived here and winter safe and free. My district gets to live their lives as free people. Yours doesn’t. It’s been living in hell for a year now, and you really need to fix that, don’t you? Sure, you’ll write them off as long as you need as a war necessity--’not top priority’ or whatever shit Coin wants to label them--but at the end of the day, you _need_ Twelve.” She looked up at his face. “Tell me I’m wrong?”

He felt like he’d been gut punched. He hadn’t really even allowed himself to admit it, willing to be as ruthless as he needed and wield the knife to cut away the vulnerabilities, the things Coin and others could use against him. He’d refused to let Corday’s negotiations fuck with him by the Capitol offering Twelve as the oh-so-obvious emotional bargaining chip. But it was there. He’d bowed his head last winter and left Twelve to suffer under Thread’s tenure while he did his best to keep Katniss and Peeta alive. Big picture only, no room for the luxury of sentiment. Just like all those years he’d kept aloof for their own good, to keep Snow from focusing in on them.

That had been necessity then, but since he’d fought for numerous other districts’ freedom, and left Twelve hanging. Hanging--it felt like a bleak but accurate description the more he considered it, dangling from the noose and slowly strangling. Had he been so determined to not endanger the bigger picture that he really had walled Twelve away, just like he’d accused Johanna of doing?

He had to admit he had, and he needed to make it right. “You’re right.” 

She nodded at that, turning off the sink. “Do you need to just set them free, or get them to accept you again, or what?”

“I don’t know. I...I honestly haven’t thought that far ahead.” He thought maybe it would be enough to set them free and finally clear his sense of debt. He couldn’t say whether he’d live again in Twelve--too many memories, too many failures. But on the other hand, Peeta, Madge, Vick, and Posy were all Twelve, and maybe he shouldn’t deny them their heritage. It was a question for later, though. First things first; win back the district and free the people.

“We’d better come up with a good plan, then, with minimal forces. You know Coin won’t commit to a full-scale assault.’

He noticed her choice of word. “‘We’, huh?” 

“Like I’m going to let you do it alone.” Her fond eyeroll said it all. “Besides, you helped free Seven. Only fair. And isn’t it nice we have Peacekeeper intel right next door to help make a plan?” 

He couldn’t help but smile. “Pass the roast and the intel, Ma.” He headed down the stairs towards his boots and coat.

After they headed over next door, the look of surprise on Petra’s face when she answered the door was priceless. Johanna spoke up first. “I assume you don’t want details on the quality of the sex, but we’re both fine. We missed all of you.”

Petra nodded. “You look good,” she told Johanna. “Happy.” A knowing look passed between mother and daughter he couldn’t quite decipher, but that didn’t matter. “Well, if you’re up for kitchen work…”

“I’ll get the potatoes,” he answered dryly, “always was good with a knife.” Hearing the happy shout and seeing her race his way, he crouched just in time to catch Lindy as she tried to latch onto his legs. “Maybe in five minutes,” he amended, hearing Petra’s knowing chuckle. Yeah, this was right where he needed to be right now, and the contentment of it settled over him like a comforting blanket. Come what may, for the time being life was good.

“What are they doing here so early--” he heard Fog’s voice. “You two didn’t turn on the radio, did you?” The battery operated radio was the replacement in the districts without power--usually the Capitol broadcast at five in the evening, and the rebels around eight. 

“We were busy,” he answered with dry understatement, hearing Johanna’s low chuckle. “Why?”

“It seems freedom is infectious,” Fog replied with the same dry tone. “Some of our Thirteen allies got a little resentful of heading back home to their regimen there after experiencing life in the districts they’d fought to get from Capitol control. There was a propo last night from Thirteen that there had been an uprising and Coin was deposed.”

“What?” He stared at Fog. He couldn’t be sorry for that, but it seemed so sudden. “What exactly happened?”

Fog’s brown eyes betrayed his concern. “All we’ve got is the propo. No details yet. Not like we really had a chance to establish a good spy network in Thirteen, bo--son. But we’re trying to make contact.”

He glanced over at Johanna, instinctively holding on to Lindy a bit tighter. A dozen thoughts churned in his head, hundreds of possibilities. It was a Capitol lie. It was Coin’s lie trying to fake the Capitol out. It was true and Thirteen would turn insular and abandon them. It was true and Thirteen would be too damn busy tearing itself apart to care about the war. It was true and it would all turn out well. It was the Capitol who’d made it happen to throw Thirteen into chaos. He shut them all out for the moment. “Well, let’s go ahead and spend time as a family first,” he said firmly. “The rest can wait till tonight.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey campers! It's been a long radio silence. I've had a lot going on taking my time in the last year and a half, and I also ran into the issue of trying to figure out how to wrap this behemoth up in a way that felt true and shorter than a million words. But I've always wanted to turn this WIP into a finished story, because you deserve it. I feel like I've got a better grasp on that now, so here we go. No promises on how quickly chapters might come out, but it'll certainly be quicker than this one. :)


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